(I had a friend who thought that's what Elton John was saying in "Tiny Dancer," so now I can't hear that song or the name Tony Danza without mentally singing those lyrics.)
Today was an exciting day at the office, since we got invited to attended a special Town Hall Meeting at Temple University, with Tony Danza, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Philadelphia Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, and a few others, to discuss Danza's experience teaching high school in Philly last year for the show "Teach," as well as the Department of Education's new "Teach" campaign.
I guess I don't know what I expected it to be like, but I have to say I was disappointed with what it actually turned out to be. They were incredibly disorganized, and the whole thing started almost an hour late, after lots of people with clipboards yelling and trying to shuffle around what was clearly way too many invitees for the size of the auditorium. We ended up sitting all the way to the right of the stage so we could only see the profile of the last panelist, who was just some random Philly teacher, but I shouldn't complain too much because other people waited around the whole time and then didn't even get in.
Once it finally got started, the first half was just various A&E executives giving speeches about how much they value education, and how A&E is going to solve the education crisis by donating DVDs of History channel shows to teachers. I don't really know why I was surprised by this excessive plugging, but I was. When it was finally time for the Q&A with the panelists, pretty much every question was some version of "I'm about to graduate from Temple, how can I become a teacher?" or "X is the most important thing in education, why don't you support it??", where X was anything from the arts to black male teachers (not to say that either of those aren't important, but those aren't exactly nuanced questions). Every answer was just re-arrangements of various talking points, like "we are working on that" or "race to the top!" Again, I don't even know why I was surprised at the lack of real, meaningful dialogue - I guess I should just be impressed that no one yelled "you lie!" or went completely crazy. Isn't it kind of sad that the bar for a reasonable discussion is that no one hurled insults at each other?
I think the most excruciating part, however, was when this Temple senior got up and introduced herself as working for TFA (I'm guessing she's one of the outreach people that Recruitment hires to get people to apply), then proceeded to ramble on incoherently for seemingly forever about TFA, what it is, how she's applying to it, and that anyone interested could meet her "at the bell tower" afterward. She didn't even have a question to ask, and she was a really poor speaker, so the whole thing was really embarrassing and made TFA look pretty bad. I could hear the people behind me making snarky comments about her and her "stupid program," and I really wanted to turn around and say "the program's not stupid, only she is!" I actually think she might be in trouble, since so many actual TFA staff people were there and were all equally appalled by her poor representation of us; Recruitment is probably going to get some complaints...
Anyway, despite it being pretty uninformative, it was at least cool to see Arne Duncan live in person. When we were leaving the campus, we had to pull over for a black SUV with a police escort, which I'm guessing was him on his way to his next gig...
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