3:37 p.m. - 2004-10-22
Barriers - all sorts
My favorite day o'the week - FRIDAY! Just back from an extra long, but exceedingly interesting meeting on recruiting minotiry teachers and the lack of programs in our region. I had suggested last month when they were setting up this meeting that it might be a good idea to put FACES on these statistics, to let the powerful people who are at this meeting actually talk to the people who are going through this process that the organization I work for implemented. It was amazing, moving, inspirint - here are people who overcame the obstacles you think about (escaping poverty, or a terrorist regime and coming to a place that may not be accepting of them, and not speaking the language right away) and already they want to be role models for their children, and other children, and give back to the communities that they live in especially when there are students who have never seen students who look like them. I'm probably not describing this well, but I heard the personal and professional stories of five individuals from different parts of the world who are now teachers because the place that I work for helped them deal with the barriers to becoming educators - and now they are teaching math and science and reading - it is amazing. People were weeping. And they are grateful to this country.
Here is the opposite of that - I just went to the printer to retrieve something and I found a 50 page document from the "bureau to reduce documentation" or something equally silly. Fifty pages!
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