Schools Chancellor Joel Klein invited teachers to e-mail him their concerns – and now he’s getting a spamful of “e-rants” about bulletin boards, classroom assignments, unruly students, uninvolved parents and lack of supplies.
“We were not provided with enough basic tools we need to teach. For example, we have no maps or globes,” wrote Jen Carroll, a fourth-grade teacher in Queens.
Burt Sheier, a dean and veteran math teacher at IS 68 in Brooklyn, said some of the new classroom directives are too onerous.
He said he observes many classes and sees instructors worrying about “trivial” things such as deadlines to decorate bulletin boards, what words to write on blackboards and placing students in “unworkable” group seating arrangements.
An “extremely frustrated” rookie eighth-grade English teacher in Manhattan flunked the new seating arrangements.
“I must say that the concept of seating students, four or five teenagers, together and expecting them to do anything other than talk . . . is just not working,” said the first-year teacher, who formerly spent 23 years as a computer operator.
He said the mandated “balanced literacy” English curriculum shuns the basics of grammar in favor of having kids do their own reading and writing. But he complained that many kids lack the basic literacy skills do independent work.
United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten encouraged her members to write to the chancellor and to Mayor Bloomberg as part of a campaign to stop what it views as micromanagement, and forwarded The Post some of the e-rants.
Teachers seethed most about deadlines to spruce up bulletin boards.
“We actually received a memo last year as to how a bulletin board should look and the various elements it should contain,” said A. Tory, a staffer at PS-MS 306 in The Bronx.
Another veteran teacher wrote, “What is more important – how a bulletin board is decorated or if a student is learning to think and question? Unfortunately . . . the bulletin boards seem to be of greater concern!”