My name is Dr. Trudy Jermanovich and I read this with sadness.

Last week Mr. Fitz posted: “The last straw has finally hit.”

“We are asked to treat students like data points and push them to score higher. We’re told to pay less attention to students who might not make gains because they won’t help the school grade. Everything is supposed to be benchmark-aligned, even though sometimes you need to teach non-benchmarked activities to motivate students to succeed on benchmarks. Actually the curriculum becomes even narrower, because not all benchmarks are tested. You are supposed to just focus on the students and benchmarks that will allow the school to make testing gains and raise the grades. Teaching is no longer about students. It’s about statistics.
Every aspect of teaching that I love and that I was once rewarded for has been stomped on by Orwell’s boot in the face. What used to be a good teacher had now become a non-compliant teacher. And what used to be a lazy teacher was now a good teacher.
So when the message came that they were messing with the copy center, trivial though that may sound, it really was a last straw kind of thing. If you have not had a career that you love so much, a job you can’t wait to get to each day, a job where, as Frederick Buechner put it, “your great joy meets the world’s great need,” perhaps you cannot comprehend what it is like to see that job systematically dismantled over a span of 20 years. It’s very stressful. And depressing.”

“My teaching career didn’t begin in ease and order. I had very difficult students, as I have written elsewhere. But what I did have was freedom. I was able to deal with those difficult classes because I had the autonomy to invent ways to do it. I could choose what texts to read (with the help of the copy center). I could choose what writing assignments to give. I could pace things and order things in a way that was tailored to meet my students where they were. I could focus on authentic literacy. In reading that meant no one-right-answer questions, but questions and answers you could defend.”

From: mrfitz.com