I read about Penn State sports--not because I particularly care, and not even because my non-sporty daughter graduated from there, but because my nephew is a sports writer whose beat is mostly PSU. He's a good guy and the only person in my family who actually supports himself by writing.
He recently dropped this piece about the coaching staff for Penn State football, and the stories of how they came to follow head coach James Franklin to Happy Valley.
It's one of those moments where I felt I was gazing into a completely different world. Imagine if every teacher came with her own personal support staff. What a world.
Imagine. Instead of offering detailed high quality curricula that was supposed to lessen the teacher workload or super-duper AI-branded software that was supposed to take some of the load of teachers, teachers with actual support staffs--one, or even more than one, live humans who helped that teacher do her job. Imagine a world in which "staff meeting" refers to the daily meeting a teacher has with her support staff.
Imagine a teacher who's backed up by a group of expert specialists that she can tag in for lessons in particular areas, or who work with students with particular needs or academic issues, some of whom used the experience to launch their own teaching careers.
How cool would it be. A teacher with an office that includes desks for her various staff members, who regularly bounce back and forth between working with the students and getting work done (planning, clerical, design, etc) in the office, where they are regularly able to interact and discuss students and educational issues for the class. Educators working as a team rather than in isolation. A teacher with so much support that she doesn't have to decide which part of her job (or her life) is not going to get her attention today. And the little things--Heck, if you're not a teacher, you may not be able to appreciate what a liberating game changer it would be to be able to say, "I need a set of copies of this paper--please go get them for me right this second." (Or, for that matter, "I have to pee--would you step in and teaching this for just a minute.")
Imagine a staff of 70 teachers who don't have to share the same secretary (who really doesn't work for them, but for the administration) or the same copy machine.
We can even imagine the teachers' staff dumping a cooler of water and ice over the teacher's head after a batch of great test results.
Imagine, in short, that teachers got the same kind of support as big time coaches.
Sure, it would require a redesign of school buildings, and the personnel costs would be huge as well. This is the kind of fantasy that belongs to the whole category of "Things we would do if we really thought that education was a money-is-no-object priority."
But wouldn't it be cool.
You described my job as a teachers' aid, including many symbolic coolers of water, and why I believe that every adult at the school who is not a teacher ought to be part of the teachers' support staff. The personnel costs would increase, yes, but perhaps not as much as one might think. For example, the money spent on people and plans at odds with supporting teachers could be re-directed.
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