Membership, Anonymous Membership and No Membership

  • The Teacher Syndicate is more than me doing stuff by myself.  There's a whole group of teachers contributing their best resources, and there's a few affiliate factories making the newest and best quality education resources you can find at such low prices.
  • You can pretty much access everything without logging in, without a password, and without any advertising!  If you want to buy something, all you need to do is tell PayPal or myself where to deliver the products.
  • If you want to sign yourself up for free membership, there's a lot of benefits - and your membership can be completely anonymous.  You can make up any username and password to log in, and you can manage all of your email and purchases through this site.  And much more!
  • I've had my fair share of teacher-related drama, and I've had my fair share of things I have wanted to say and share, but really couldn't.  Me, Jake Riley, teacher at Central City State School, just can't make a resource about drug education and hand it out to my students.  It would cause a bit of concern.
  • That's a bit extreme, so how about if I wrote the top 10 ways to teach reading and hold an after school learning workshop for my students' parents, and given them a hand-out at the end of the session?  That's something I actually did, and it caused massive controversy (the drug resource would have been safer).  
  • Well, I offended:
    • parents that were successfully using techniques I didn't list
    • other teachers because I didn't list all of the ways they taught reading 
    • the Principal because my if my tips were so good, why wasn't every other teacher doing them, and how much would it cost to give students what I had now described as 'the best' way of teaching reading?
    • the visiting literacy expert who thought it was her job to be the 'expert' in the school and questioned my qualifications of writing such a list, even though her advice was always vague and unhelpful 
    • the regional office who automatically assumed I was illegally distributing copyright materials that someone else wrote, like "The Thinking Hats" which is copyrighted and is often the centre of a lawsuit
    • the central department as my concept of 'reading' wasn't aligned to the new terminology, jargon and trademarked logos and images they had developed for their mass-media communication strategy, which was a whole lot of nothing, so I didn't understand how they could be offended.
  • I was actually quite proud of my top 10 list.  I had taught for a while, and I had some ideas that were working well with my class, that could be worth sharing beyond the four walls of my classroom.  I was in a tough school teaching kids in families with three generations of unemployment, imprisonment and poverty (and probably illiteracy).  And because I am me, my list was a bit on the creative and innovative side.
  • In my own school, when I distributed the list, I got hammered and I was the target of many stern glances.  I was never to communicate my ideas to other staff in such a way again.  Bad Jake.  Bad.  
  • At the same time, my spouse (at the time) took my list to their school, whose teachers didn't know me from a bar of soap.  I was an author with a name that didn't mean anything, and there were no details of my employment.  I could have been at a school 45 minutes away, or on the other side of the world.   This was another tough school, with worse socio-economic factors.  My partner shared with one other teacher, who then thought it was good enough to copy for all 35 teachers in the school.  It was new, it was solution based (rather than rhetoric based) and the ideas echoed with those teachers as they knew I was trying to solve problems they shared too.
  • It was a hard hitting lesson.  A lot of times we automatically trust resources from people we don't know, as we tend to look outwards to solutions to our problems, when looking inwards at our own talented employees would often produce better results.
  • By all means, use the Teacher Syndicate as your sandpit to develop ideas and practice new ways to engaging with other teachers. When you have established a good presence, you're free to move back into your regular employer's system as a super-star teacher and use their tools. 

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