Spring Break!

Well, spring break is finally upon me.  And why am I still at school?  I need to do a blog entry.

During spring break, I will be at home and working during the week.  I work at a child care center in the summer and whenever I can during breaks from school.  I will be teaching a class of preschoolers next week.  I am very excited to get back to working with the kids - which is the real reason that I am going into teaching.  I can't wait to take a break from "talking" about teaching and being able to actually teach.

I will apply some of my new knowledege when I teach next week, and will blog about my experience after spring break.

Ok.  Now it's time to go home and see all my kids!

The Business of Education

In today's lecture, we talked about structure.  Structure is an essential element of business.  This inspired me to think about school as if it were a business and the structure which it is made up of.  The structure is as follows:

Superintendent -- CEO

School Board -- Board of Directors

Principals -- Managers

Department Heads -- Mid-Level Managers

Teachers -- Workers

Students -- The Product

Parents -- Investors

Government -- Auditing Authorities

I believe that it is acceptable to think of a school as business.  The only difference is that the workers (teachers) can't be fired as easily as workers in a typical business.  If this structure is accurate, and parents are the investors, then the schools need to be sure that they always act with the parents' best interests in mind.  In my managerial finance class, we learned that the goal of every corporation should be to maximize shareholder wealth. In the case of education, maximizing the wealth of the investors would mean maximizing the learning of the students.  If every school operated with this mentality, I believe that the business of education would improve.

HGTV and Schools

I enjoy watching the television channel HGTV, although I don't have my own house to decorate, nor am I in the process of buying a house, so most of the information from that channel is generally irrelevant to my life at this point in time.  But, while watching "House Hunters" the other day, the channel became very relevant to my life.

On "House Hunters," a family tours three houses and chooses one to buy.  For this particular episode, the family had a long list of things they were looking for in their new home.  At the top of the list was a good school district for their children.  I had never before thought about the influence a school has on the surrounding community.  It seems like we are often so focused on what goes on inside the school that we forget how our actions affect what goes on outside the school. 

I hope that I will help to make my future school district one that families want to move to.  One way that I could do this is through community outreach programs.  I believe that the school should give back to the community as much as possible (good PR, if you wish).  My music students could give concerts in the community, or lead music workshops for all interested citizens. 

In a time when many schools are focused on the negitive, giving back to the community could be a positive, and encourage a greater connection between the school and community.