interview
finding a house
first day football
THe 9s
chile visit chapel
Report
Destroying the art room
History friend and wrestlers on the floor
exam cheating and mark as usual
Classroom invasion
Anna post invasion meeting
Eddas story
Edda on my PC
Naomi´s story
Meeting Naomi
Surgery interview
DPs meeting
Senora Ks
Dont let them revise
Back of room
dont know dont care
ppt corrections
and tidying my desk
editing myp
talk with Ursula
Every Thursday all the teachers gather in Victoria Hall, a wooden floored, concrete walled echo chamber, for some activity. The first two meetings, Marco, a well rounded father, who taught history, asks some questions with a degree of hostility. This is a refreshing open and consultative environment, I thought. He was answered with additional hostility by the “Peruvian Director”, and never asked questions again. No-one did. He left at the end of the year.
Every week after that, the “Peruvian Director” subjected us to a 90 minute lecture. She was talking to a room full of experienced teachers some of whom had been teaching the International Baccalaureate curriculum or the IB Middle Years Programme for 8 years, but her chosen form was the lecture. She had no experience of teaching either curriculum. Those that did were not asked to contribute.
Sometimes she spoke for ninety minutes without any materials. Sometimes she put on the screen a page from the MYP handbook, three hundred torturous words, and talked about it for 20 minutes.
Sentences without end agglomerated into a unstructured mass, without a comma or a paragraph in sight. This was domination by an excess of words, all in Spanish, orotund, endless, meaningless bullying sentences, a metaphor for the Spanish colonial destruction of culture by the denial of a voice. The extirpadors de los idolatrias, the catholic priests who went on visits to communities to humiliate Peruvians with public whippings, forced confessions, and to destroy their religious objects,, all in order to impose their hierarchical power structures and amorality, probably spoke in a similar style.
On one occasion she tried to show a video, but it did not run. After six months of delivering monologues without resources to a room full of experienced teachers, she presented a video (which did run) of a teacher in the 1970s delivering a lecture without resources to a room full of students sitting at spaced desks in rows.
“What`s wrong with this?”
Total silence from 40 teachers.
“Come on anybody, what is wrong with this style of teaching?”
No answer.
“Its out of date. It does not work!”
Silence. And perhaps now a sliver of self awareness slips in as she turns to look at the video.
That was the last time we were subjected to 90 minutes of linguistic bullying. The following week we had a new teacher of the teachers.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
I had joined part way through the year, to discover that I had little clue of how the school operated. There was no information about who the people around me were, no school structure, various computer systems for communicating with students and parents that were unexplained, another system for inputting marks that had several hundred pages in Spanish. I suggested to my head of department that some training or introduction would be useful, at our weekly meetings. I suggested it every week for a year. She did not reply. She was a master of the silent response.
I mentioned this to another teacher, who said that was the responsibility of my head of department.
There was a system of organising homeworks for the students, which involved putting a message on a web portal that students read. But there were unpublished rules about what homework could be given,with what notice, and without conflict with other subjects. All rules were unpublished. My Head of Department said there were some rules written down somewhere but nobody paid any attention to them. Other people said ask Martha. I asked several people. Most seemed to have perfected the skill of offering support whilst not answering the question. Though in a way, there were answering the question, clearly there were no rules, and the very concept of rules was faintly embarrassing. Nobody said, “yes, we have rules, and here they are.” Until I finally asked the right person in my third year.
The problem with the “ask Martha” solution is that every incident or occasion would produce its own ad hoc ruling. And it took time. Easier for me to continue to live in a sea of grey areas.
In effect, I felt, the students never did homework, because they could always point to some small print of the procedure that had not been followed. As a consequence, the easiest solution for me was to never give homework. After two years when I raised this with the head of DP as a major problem in getting the students to a standard where they could succeed in the examinations, I was met with a sort of blandly supportive non-response, a hmmm.
I did realise after two years that students would do homework, and in fact it was impossible to cover the course adequately without this. It was the students themselves that suggested they should have homework and told me how to organise it.
The “Peruvian Director”, spoke excellent english but refused to speak it with me. I felt she saw me as a staff member with a defect, inadequate spanish, and had decided that the school priority, her personal priority, was to correct this defect. So that, two weeks after I was interviewed and offered a job by herself and others speaking in english, she invited me to her office and spoke entirely in rapid unstructured spanish. I entered a room where she was chatting with the english teachers over lunch, and she hastily changed to speaking spanish.
I sent an email to
The. following day I went to her at ten and asked for the powerpoint. She took out a heavily annotated copy. “You should put the subtopics on each page. Otherwise they won`t understand it. And put links to videos here. And write the page numbers of the book that it refers to.”
She handed me my copy of the sixty page powerpoint, with minor amendments, mainly additions, on most pages.
She pulled out a sheaf of additional notes written in red. They were written on two scraps of paper that appeared to have been torn, not from a notebook but from a sandwich wrapper. And then they had been stapled together, to make them more presentable.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Hacienda Management
We aim to train our students for the competitive commercial world, the global economy.
In this world, management do their planning at the start of the year. From this annual plan flow strategies and actions, medium and long term goals, which are then communicated to different areas/units/divisions and thence to teams and individuals. The communication may be simply an email, but often could be a meeting, a workshop, or other interactive activities.
Training, departmental meetings, staff meetings and so on are thereafter driven by this plan, these actions and goals.
We see an example of this in The School’s Five Year Plan.
In the school, planning takes place in five stages.
There is training for teachers with workshops within school and in mixed groups with other school.
There are detailed instructions from heads of department
There is the sharing of the school calendar which includes holidays, school trips (normally a week in term 2) sports events.
There is communication of any overall management themes.
Teachers create their planning for the year in the form primarily of unit plans which include class by class, week by week, teaching within a overarching Concept and Inquiry.
It wold be an interesting exercise for students studying Business to put these activities in the most effective chronological order, but they would never hit on the school’s solution.
Teachers are asked to plan their entire year at the end of December. At the same time, management meet to discuss their plans.
Internal and external training takes place in late February. Keen or new teachers might adjust their Unit Plans to include new ideas.
The week before term starts, management may issue some detailed orders, such as only including one ATL skill per unit. Teachers adjust their Unit Plans.
In the first week of term, departmental heads and the head of MYP look at teachers’ unit plans and tell them to rewrite them.
A few weeks later, the school calendar is shared. Teachers adjust their Unit Plans.
These activities are not efficient or effective.
####################
Kusi, aged forty, has cooked a handful of meals in her life. “I once had a dinner party for 8 people” she boasts. Only once.
Encera cooks every day for her husband and children. she has cooked thousands of meals.
Every day, Encera comes as an empleada to Kusi’s house and Kusi spends half an hour telling her what to buy in the market, and then how to cook it.
These activities are not aiming to be efficient or effective.
###############
I volunteer to help in a settlement on the edge of Lima, where houses built of thin board are scattered up the hillside. The community is building a road or trackway between their houses, on a Sunday morning. Thirty villagers are working, moving rocks to clear the route. Four or five people are putting the rocks like a jigsaw to create a solid foundation. It is called dry stone walling and it is a complex skill which I do not have.
Back in Miraflores, I tell my landlady about my day. She looks confused, or perhaps appalled.
“You have to tell them what to do!” she exclaims.
###########
In the supermarket in Miraflores a man is shopping with his empleada, his maid. She pushes the supermarket trolley. He tells her “A tin of tuna” and she takes a tin from the shelf and puts it in the trolley. And so they go.
These activities are not aiming to be efficient or effective. They are maintaining five hundred year old power structures in Lima society.
###############
At school, once a week, an alarm goes at eleven, and all the students and teachers leave their classrooms.
They gather in the grounds in circles and someone checks their names. Then five hundred students and teachers walk across the grass to another point, where our Peruvian Director makes a rather long speech, amplified into meaninglessness by a faulty sound system. And so we go.
An hour later we receive an email declaring the exercise a success. A teacher is not present and no-one checks the names of one class, but the email still announces the success.
So in this charade of pomp and power orchestrated by our Peruvian director, the fundamentals of the educational course we claim to teach, rubrics, assessment, feedback, are turned on their head. We are not told what we are doing and why (no rubric), the feedback is false, and is based on dishonest assessment.
We are mimicking the form without understanding the fundamentals. Children dressing up as adults.
To put this in context, the national education system in Peru, which is where almost all our teachers and staff learnt their values, has no rubric, false feedback and fake assessment. They are only continuing what they learnt at school.
A senior staff member visits my office, her arm over the shoulder of a 15 year old boy student.
“I have known this boy for many years, he is a close personal friend, and I want to make sure he will get a good grade.” she says, beaming. The student had decided not to sit the international exam, so for the past two months I had let him sit at the back of the class and “do something quiet.”
“As there is no meaning in the national grades, I could give him anything,” I reply.
” No, they are very important, he needs good grades to get into University.”
Later she explained precisely how to ensure he got a good grade.
“Give him several short tests, quizzes, different types of problems. Then when you have marked them, you can decide which you are going to use for the grade.”
******************************************************++
Later, I ask my Head of Department how the National Education system of grading works.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” she replies. I felt that for once she was telling me the truth.
These activities are not aiming to be efficient or effective. They are maintaining power structures in Lima society.
***************************************************+
Every material I want to photocopy needs the approval of my Head of Department. Every worksheet I prepare for students is read closely – “is this correct English?” – and amended. I print off another copy and bring it back for approval.
I teach seven different grades with different worksheets for each. One response to the approval system is to produce very few materials. One worksheet is used for four weeks. Or one printed powerpoint for the whole term.
Now I use Google Classroom and have used across over two terms. And my Head of Department is worried that she is losing control.
And so it goes.
These activities are not aiming to be efficient or effective.
In the competitive commercial world works, in the global economy, management do their planning at the start of the year. From this annual plan flow strategies and actions, medium and long term goals, which are then communicated to different areas/units/divisions and thence to teams and individuals.
Training, departmental meetings, staff meetings and so on are thereafter driven by this plan, these actions and goals.
I spent my life working in the competitive commercial world world, in the global economy. As a well paid consultant, writing publicity materials, for blue chip international companies. Earning more per hour than I now get per day.
And in Peru, people correct my English.
And attempt to intimidate me because I suggest the introduction for new teachers could be improved.
********************************************
July 2018 Passing Portas`s office on the way to the print room, she called me in. She wanted to talk to me about Charles` personal project, the culmination of six months work.
The Global Concept, the big idea which was to inform Charles’ work, was helping others and finite resource
He started by fitting a dynamo to a bike, adding a step down transformer to deliver ten volts dc and connecting it to a iphone placed in a charging box mounted on the handlebars. Researching what he needed, finding where to buy the parts, persuading his brother to take him there, took him the month of May.
“That’s great, but how are you helping others?”
He made a video explaining the E-bike and showing him riding it. We showed the video to school groups and other teachers to spread the idea, which in essence was renewable energy.
“That’s great, but how are you helping others?”
He decided his mission was to communicate the idea of renewable energy. He made a list of teachers and students with bikes, events he could attend, bike rides, school sports day. And then he made a second video, “Sharing the idea”.
In this he describes how he told a friend about the bike and they said, “that’s no good, what you should do is make a turbine to put in the river to make more energy.” And he though, “Woohoo, that’ s it, I have shared my idea to make a better idea!”
He placed this video on YouTube, shared it with students, had a link placed in the school newsletter which was sent to all staff and parents, and then arranged to stand in the front of the school assembly to present his idea. He waited to be announced by the head girl. Instead they called on everyone to sing the school song and then return to class.
He went to see the
before he could present, he re-arranged for the next Assembly.
She had marked it, as she was the moderator, and she gave it “a generous three…. giving due allowance for his difficulties with language”. I smiled.
“Well lets see how the IB will grade it.”
I had given it a six on eight.
There were also, she said, issues of academic honesty. She doubted he had made the bike, the video. I said I had no worries about academic honesty and had signed my approval. I had followed the whole process in detail, talking to him every week. His brother or cousin had helped him, but he was entirely open about that. The bike was not the product, the product was to communicate his ideas. The bike was simply a tool. And I had seen him do spreading the concept, talking to individuals, to the green committee, to classes of students, and to the School Assembly.
She said she would not be submitting the work to the IB.
“But why why would you not send it to the IB?”
“Because it does not meet the minimum standards for a Personal Project.”
If she had concerns about academic honesty, I said, she should talk to Charles, ask him about the project.
She repeated that she believed the work to be dishonest and inadequate and would not submit it. I repeated that as supervisor I had followed the work every step of the way and was confident that it was correctly done, but she could satisfy herself by simply asking Charles to explain. She put on her “I`m furious” face and told me to leave.
Over the weekend I checked the IB guidelines, it seemed the appropriate response to suspected academic dishonesty was to submit a report to the IB. It was mandatory that all students be registered for the Personal Project. These projects were marked by the school, moderated internally and then sent to the IB for marking. A student who did not complete his Personal Project did not complete the MYP course.
I sent an enquiry to the IB helpline asking how best I could support a student who was being accused of academic dishonesty and threatened with not submitting his PP.
The next week Charles told me he had been asked to make some changes. He later went and showed her his project journal, which she had never looked at, whiich included detailed descriptions and photos of how he had made the bike charger and the videos. We together went to ask if she was satisfied and she assured Charles that she had never doubted his honesty nor doubted my assurances, it was simply a matter of including the material in the report.
Meanwhile his parents had sent me an email asking to speak to me urgently.
I met with
ARe you happy here?
********************************
No Im not. The transparency or lack of it, the management structure, the lack of communication, the abusive behaviour, I`ve had enough of it.
“So…I thought it was just me.”
It seems that
“They lie. They lie all the time. They lie to protect their position, to cover up their mistakes, to blame others for their laziness. They lie just for the feeling of power they get from lying. Its corruption just the same as we have in the country, they all cover up for each other to stay in power.”
*********************************************
Management, for their part, are focused on planning, empowering, facilitating.
This is not the same as telling everyone what to do.
that style of management is largely extinct in the competitive world outside narcobusiness and the Catholic Church.
2. we work from 7.30 to 3.30 or 4.00 five days a week. Except in extraordinary cases, if the work can not be completed in this time, management should be looking to solve the problem. That is why they are paid more.
3. What are our goals and our plan.
4. our goals are to improve
our teaching, this is a measurable goal, by student results.
How can we do this? By sharing best practice, as scientists, seeing what works and what doesnt.
By respecting the different professional experiences and assets of the team and seeing this as a potential strength.
By raising our eyes and opening our ears.
Because nothing will change unless we listen and look.
What are the big issues we face as a school
Parent dissatisfaction
losing experienced teachers?
Budgetary problems?
Not following/understanding Myp – as evidenced by PP grading
Because the three of them decided to appoint someone with poor English, limited Physics and no relevant teaching experience to teach a demanding Physics course to five year groups.
After this, they are joined in a cover-up, the insecure Peruvian Director who has never taught beyond Primary, and has no management experience, but has a offshore degree from a Spanish University which she achieved without leaving Peru. The Secretary promoted to Head of Human Resources, and the Biology Teacher newly promoted to Head of Department.
You can try to analyse how Peru sank into a corrupt dictatorship which was supported by much of the population,
why a President who set the National economy back 20 years in just three years of hyperinflation, who had 170 prisoners murdered by the army and has yet to stand trial, who signed Presidential pardons for 7000 drug kingpins at an alleged 20,000 dollars each…and was then re-elected 20 years laoter. and most of the rich and powerful, whilst it murdered men, women and children at a neighbourhood fund-raising chicken dinner, initiated a campaign to cut open and destroy the ability to bear children of hundreds of thousands of women in the poorest parts of the country, and carried it out unperturbed for five years, until the dictator fled the country, and it stole thousands of millions of dollars from this extremely poor country which is unable or unwilling to provide education or basic bealthcare to 60% of the country.
Or, perhaps easier to investigate, you can ask how a school which claimed to have international standards came to be headed up by a “Director” who had never taught beyond 10 year olds, that has a half a day training for new staff, a “Human Resources” head who has no Linked In account, an “organogram” or staff strucure presented to new teachers on which teachers do not exist, a school with no rules, no staff assessment, and no system of communications and feedback that allows teachers to share their concerns openly.
a trio of trained “psychologists” who are said to have a level of senior management above teachers and heads of department, but, none of them over thirty, carry the bags and fill out the forms for a psych0logicaly damaged management in a psychologically damaged school which they refuse to see.
It is, essentially, the same question.
A total breakdown of responsibility, integrity, truth.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
interview
finding a house
first day football
THe 9s
chile visit chapel
Report
Destroying the art room
History friend and wrestlers on the floor
exam cheating and mark as usual
Classroom invasion
Anna post invasion meeting
Eddas story
Edda on my PC
Naomi´s story
Meeting Naomi
Surgery interview
DPs meeting
Senora Ks
Dont let them revise
Back of room
dont know dont care
ppt corrections
and tidying my desk
editing myp
talk with Ursula