From HuffPost’s The Blog

A flipped learning guru from the west coast recently visited my school for an afternoon professional development session. He started his presentation by remarking about how impressed he was during his walk around our school building because “the faculty is young and vibrant. It’s such a breath of fresh air.” Excuse me? I may be 55 years old, but I still consider myself pretty damn vibrant.

That wasn’t the first time someone implied that veteran teachers are not as valuable as young teachers. A reporter from the Boston Globe wrote an op-ed piece about my high school in which he attributed part of our success to the fact that “Traditional pecking orders were scuttled. Skills trumped seniority.” Now, perhaps I’m being oversensitive, but I’m an English teacher — and that quote implies that because I have seniority, I don’t have skills. Instead of being happy about an article that celebrated my school’s success, my fellow veteran teachers and I were incensed…

What I want to know is: when did my age and length of teaching experience become the defining factor in my ability to teach?.. Read more>>