Lounge

Kevin,

I went to the site you cite and it appears that the site solicits identification of "effective practices" or nominations for "outstanding educators".

The former appears to be somewhat dubious in that they are chosen from those self-selecting as persons seeking recognition with colleagues willing to spend time promoting same (in our local District a new teacher was recently awarded a handsome monetary award for doing things that dozens of Master teachers had been doing for years, the basis for the award therefore appearing to be the promotional competencies of the teacher and his local unit admin, as opposed to the substantive methods, practices, etc. of the teacher recognized (indeed, I know teachers who were in fact threatened with discipline over the same practices for which the teacher awarded the prize was recognized._.

The latter, requiring institutional "cover", may appear to be a very nice way to recognize outstanding teachers, but likewise self-selects for those a) surfing for such opportunities and b) having the resources available to pursue nomination. c) having the support of their administration (unfortunately innovative and effective teachers are often anathema to their administrators), and d) are politically acceptable (I don't care how outstanding you are, if you lead a Nazi Youth Group in your off hours you will not get an award - lol.) In other words, do such awards in fact remove motivation from those "in the trenches" who do not seek recognition (I know few in the ranks of the most engaged and dedicated educators who work in situations in which even the human resources are available to pursue such recognition.

What am I missing?

p.s. Appropriate scripting on the SFSU ilearning server that provides Moodle CVS which monitored inodes and deleted expired files in /tmp could arguably keep the server from being rendered unable to do updates. An SA providing such a resource is I think just the kind of of person who doesn't get recognized, as he is toiling away working to make things better, not engaged in chatter that might get him recognized.....