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Dark, soulful tales that haunt long after the last page.
It is with a heavy heart, and nervousness over the future, that I’m announcing my retirement from public education. I have been a teacher for 17 years. It has brought me great joy, a sense of purpose, a feeling of satisfaction, some awards, and many great friends. It also contributed to me missing a fair…
Teaching has lost its luster. I’m not actually teaching. My job, really, is to maintain a tenuous grip on sanity as I battle the chaos that is a room full of 8th graders. It’s stressful. It’s unfulfilling. It’s hell! I fully suspect this will be my last year in education, and that’s IF I make…
Almost everything I know has changed since separating and then being divorced. One of the biggest issues I’ve been dealing with is depression, and that — and some of its causes — has led me to the belief that I no longer know who I am. The depression has roots and symptoms that I’m not…
Tomorrow morning I’ll join many of my colleagues in voting yes to walk off my job as a teacher on April 2nd. It’s a vote that comes with a lot of anger, a lot of concern for my students, and a lot of fear for my own future. Today our district superintendent laid out what…
I haven’t blogged just to blog in quite a while. So, as I’m sort of between projects and figuring out what to do with myself at the start of summer, I thought I’d do an update on my life. Because both you readers care, right? School’s Out for summer. It was an interesting year. Not…
State Question 779 was not a good bill. It put the burden of the legislature’s job of funding teacher salaries onto the shoulders of everyone in Oklahoma, hurting the poor the most. And so it failed. One can hope people voted it down because it was a regressive tax and not because they feel like…
A friend and colleague recently showed me this article in last Sunday’s Oklahoman newspaper. The article quotes an educator with some pretty derogatory and fallacious things to say about teachers with emergency and alternative certification. For instance: “Emergency certified personnel may have had zero experience with children, may have achieved a 1.0 grade-point average or…
I have several former students who left me at the end of their senior years filled with determination and plans to inspire young minds the way some teacher(s) had done for them. Some of them are close to graduating from college now. One of them posted a link about yet another school cutting its budget…
Steven E. Wedel 