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Merit Pay for Teachers

I don’t often find myself agreeing with Sydney talkback radio host Alan Jones… I generally find him brash and arrogant, full of sweeping statements that irk me no end, but this piece from his regular video editorial actually makes sense…

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The key thing about it is that teachers who are only in teaching for the money really are in it for the wrong reasons. Of course, having said that, I think it pretty reasonable that teachers ought to be paid in comparable terms to the many other professions out there that do work which contributes far less to the greater good of the world and yet get paid far more. I know that there are probably a few paycheck-driven teachers with 8:00 to 3:00 mentalities, just as there are in every occupation, but as a whole I have never known a more hardworking group of people than teachers.

Merit pay sounds like a good idea to me, as long as we can agree on what sorts of things count as being meritorious.

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Oh Darling! Nice shot!

I spent a lovely afternoon in the city yesterday showing My Linda around. We walked around Darling Harbour for quite a while before heading down to the Rocks and Circular Quay. Sydney really is a very pretty city.

While we were at Darling Harbour I took this shot. (click to enlarge)

This photo-panorama is actually a composite of 20 individual photos. Each photo was taken slightly overlapping the previous one, and there were three rows of photos – one across the middle, then a row above and a row below. They were then taken into a wonderful piece of Mac software called Calico, which I think does an incredibly clever job of stitching them all together into a single shot. You don’t even need to tell Calico which bits go where… just dump all the photos in and it figures out where the overlaps are.

Windows users might like to look at a similar product called Autostitch.

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Equity, Dignity, Respect.

I once worked with a very nice Vice Principal. He was a charming fellow and I enjoyed working with him. In his role as VP however, he was required to be pretty strict with the kids… and he did a great job of it. His role was to uphold the rules and policies of the school and he did it with a certain authoritarian gruffness and bulldog-like tenacity. He seemed to work on the idea that if you repeated the rules often enough then the kids would eventually do the right thing (or at least have no excuse for not knowing what the right thing was!)

Every morning, he would get on the school’s PA system and reiterate the rules to the kids. And he would always, always, always finish his PA address with the phrase “Have a great day and remember to treat everyone with equity, dignity and respect”. It was something of a catchphrase for him.

The thing about this approach to repeating the rules so often is that the kids start to just tune out. I asked them one morning in homeroom whether they actually listened to what the VP was saying and they said they didn’t, they just sort of tuned out and didn’t really listen at all. We discussed this for a couple of minutes and I jokingly said that perhaps if he did it as a rap instead they might take more notice. Well, I should know better than to joke about things like that… the next morning I decided to hold my Mac up in front of the PA speaker and record the announcement, which just happened to be a real beauty outlining the sort of clothing the kids were allowed to wear on their civvies (mufti) day the next day.

I dragging the audio file into GarageBand and had a play with it for a few hours. The resulting tune became somewhat of a classic around the school, with many teachers and kids asking for a copy of it. I never did release the actual digital file of it though, because I was a bit concerned with it getting out “in the wild”, so to speak. However, since that was over a year ago and in a completely different country, I figure I may as well put it out there now.

So, for your listening and dancing pleasure, here is Equity, Dignity, Respect.

Equity, Dignity, Respect.

Just click the Audio MP3 button above to listen, or grab your own copy from my Box.net widget. Enjoy.