Last year, the genius factory down at my head office (Saitama prefecture's Board of Education) decided that it would be a great idea to combine a very low-level technical school and a moderate-level regular school. The results of the combination are the enormous school I teach at now.
Since then:
- Countless wallets and cell phones have been stolen from classrooms in the normal school.
- Tech school students wander the halls at any time, disrupt class, and mouth off to teachers.
- Fights, once extremely rare, are slowly becoming a regular occurrence.
- The school has become a disgusting garbage dump thanks to the tech students' littering.
- Teachers endure stabbing threats.
Let me make it perfectly clear (in case you already hadn't figured it out) that I do not like the technical school. The students are animals, not children. It is a complete waste of our time and the prefecture's money to try to throw teachers at them in classes they refuse to try in.
In trying to save a little money, the prefecture has succeeded. It has also succeeded in depriving hundreds of well-meaning and hard-working students of a decent learning environment. I'm sure they're pleased as punch about their money-saving decision so they can throw even more money at Wako-Kokusai high school (Saitama's notorious pet high school, which has multiple foreigners doing the same job as me for less students). Congratulations, assholes. Why don't you try to come here and teach for a week?
Comments
Guess that's what happens when there's no discipline for teachers to utilize.
Posted by: ma | October 4, 2005 8:23 PM
Funny--Kerrie just went to a meeting last evening about alternative uses of one or more elementary school buildings here in WMA in the event that they close one or lease out part of it to save money. (It sounds pretty obvious that there's no choice about it at this point.) One of the ideas that seems to be circulating is leasing out all or part of one of the buildings to one of the local voc-tech schools or even creating a charter school within one of the existing buildings.
Now, I'm not sure if any of these are really good or bad ideas, but it is similar to your situation in the sense that it is consolidation of multiple educational goals and/or groups of students under one roof with the purpose of saving money. Wonder how it'll all end up. Of course, each of the people on each of these committees has his/her own agendas because whatever they do, it may affect their own jobs.
Posted by: jansen | October 6, 2005 12:42 AM