Not in anyway giving anyone permission to plagiarize or copy this and also not verifying the authenticity of any of the information. Also note that there are probably no sources listed and I am not one myself, so don't quote me. This is just some of my homework; thought it might be interesting to someone:
Read the Case Study 1.1 (CD) Megan Brownlee
How did it make you feel
I had pretty neutral feelings regarding the Case Study 1.1. While the points that Ms. Brownlee makes about the downsides of teaching are not among the most common complaints that I have heard, I still feel like her points were only relatively bad. Her main complaints were scheduling, her colleagues, and standardized testing, but I only felt like the scheduling was actually a significant issue.
Regarding the competency and relationships with her colleagues, I think that Ms. Brownlee sums up and undermines her point best when she says, "those are the kinds of issues you find on any job." Having worked in plenty of minimum-wage jobs and in the Army, and having discussed this issue with professionals of different occupations, I strongly believe that every job is likely to have people that are not overly proficient. In response to the teachers' complaint that she is having trouble teaching a diverse group, it seemed unrealistic to me that she expected a specialist to come in and spend time in her class and then help her adjust. I cannot come up with any jobs where an individual works alone like a teacher and could get this kind of service. Maybe some sort of remedial training or something would be easier for her to find and help her deal with the issue. She might consider taking "Teaching Diverse Populations" at SPC.
I'm not particularly familiar with how standardized tests compare with the learning objectives that should prepare students for them; however, it seems to me like the solution would be to report the inconsistency of whatever questions she had not prepared for and then adjust her lessons for the future. I have always thought that teachers needed to be adaptable and should expect to make these kinds of regular changes. Maybe this issue is a big deal, I'm not really sure personally, but it did not seem like a big issue to me. Additionally, I was under the impression that a lot of standardized tests have questions that require students to apply information they have learned to a new kind of problem or to tackle problems they may have never directly learned how to solve. A real assessment should probably include at least small amounts of information both above and below a group's knowledge or skill level.
The issue regarding scheduling was the only thing I thought seemed like a significant and troubling problem. I believe that Ms. Brownlee's school is probably not trying to make her job difficult just for kicks, so it is probably the result of either bad scheduling by the school or bad scheduling directed from higher than the school/school board. If it is the former, she should try coming up with an alternative plan and explain to higher how the scheduling complicates her job or hinders her ability to properly teach. In the case of the latter, there is probably less that can be done, but this seems, once again, like a challenge that she should be prepared to discuss and adapt to accommodate. I was in GT in school and other kids in my class were in ESL or remedial reading, so this issue of kids being pulled from classes for extra instruction is obviously not new.
My overall feelings about this Case Study are that it was nice of Ms. Brownlee to tell the truth about how she felt and present a realistic impression of the job to Mrs. Ernst, but the reasons that she used to justify the difficulty of teaching or to advise her to reconsider were not adequate.
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