Letters to the Editor

Lesson plans and teachers’ rights

Oct 15, 2009 1:29 PM

To the Editor:

Your article “Lesson planning a challenge? The UFT can help” [Sept. 17] is not only useful for a new teacher, but also an experienced teacher of more than 24 years, like me.

Unfortunately, this is not only a tool to help you teach a meaningful lesson, but a tool for the administration to punish the teachers.

As an assistant principal at my school told the teachers in his department, “Even if you just taught a great lesson, I can still find it unsatisfactory because the lesson plan you were using was not well structured.”

I teach math; our AP is a physical education teacher. He observes the math teachers and tells us how to teach the students without knowing anything about the students’ knowledge of math in that class or the recent methods of teaching math.

I hope you take the time and write another good article like this and explain to the teachers their right to protect themselves against those assistant principals and principals who are not there to help the teachers, but to find something wrong to punish the teachers.

M.Y. Saaed, Franklin K. Lane HS