I love theater

Well theater has taken a new place in my life. I joined a program that is designed to fill seats in theaters. The basic premise is that for a show to go well there needs to be a decent sized audience for the actors to feed off of. When the theater is concerned about having a large enough crowd they contact seat filler companies and offer them tickets to the show. The reality is I paid $135 to be a part of the program for a year. Now whenever they are offered shows it only costs me $3.50 to go see the show. I think this is a pretty sweet deal. Now in general they aren't Broadway shows, but the off-broadway and off-off-broadway shows are also pretty good. In the past week I have seen six different shows (one was not a part of this program) and so far five out of the six that I have been to have been pretty great. Tomorrow I get to see a show called The Divine Sister which is a musical that incorporates all of the major Hollywood stories about nuns. This should be pretty amazing, but I figure that I may become too much a of theater buff. I don't know if I am going to be able to leave NY because I 'am a sucker for great cheap entertainment. At $3.50 a ticket I might as well just pay the money to sit somewhere warm.

Another great thing that has really hit the ground running is after school tutoring. Now, at my school the kids don't actually have a choice as to when they stay after for tutoring. It is actually great to get extra time to spend with them on math because just one period a day is not enough, but I also don't complained about getting paid for staying with them. According to union contract I make $42 an hour. Uncle Sam takes his chunk, but it is still a pretty penny. I now call this my theater fund.

On the topic of the union yikes. If you haven't yet heard me talk about what a terrible idea tenure is then you are probably lucky. Essentially the union protects teachers rights at all costs. By rights, I mean that they pamper to whims of teachers and 'protect' them from anything that could possibly be seen as a threat. The cost to fire a teacher by the district is about a quarter of a million dollars because of all the legal hoops that they need to jump through. The unions oppose alternative options to for education reform and then claim that since we don't have a proven alternative we should stick with the status quo even though it is failing our students. Well if you don't give something else a try it obviously cannot be proven. The same attitude is how they approach tenure. Since we don't have a proven way of removing ineffective teachers when their are budget cuts we should just stick with the system that we currently have which is to get rid of the newest teachers and keep the older ones. Now maybe I am just naive, but if I was running a company and I had to cut costs and remove people from the payroll I would probably remove the people who were least effective. While I understand concern over people being removed for inappropriate reasons, I in no way think that justifies a system that bases decisions solely on how long a teacher has been in the system. Just because you were tenured doesn't make you a good teacher or even an acceptable teacher. It basically means that you didn't screw up so badly that you were placed in serious jeopardy during your first three years as a teacher. Woohoo. This coming weekend I will be in Washington, D. C. not home :(, for Teach For America's 20th anniversary conference. I'm actually really excited to get to hear some of the speakers and to run into other folks that I know who are in TFA. Well that is all for now.