Brian L. Murphy
"The Bucket has a huge hole in it, and unless we fix the hole, we can pour all the water/new teachers we want into the bucket and there will never be enough."
MY
Thoughts
Last week I was home watching television, and a local news station began reporting on the teacher shortage that many Northern California and nationwide districts are facing as the new school year is beginning. And I was happy to see that the subject of a looming shortage of teachers was being addressed in the media.
This a huge story, (affecting millions of people) even worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, and the reporters had all missed the mark.
Their coverage included a cursory update on how many teacher positions had gone unfilled in various local school districts and steps being taken by recruiters that focused on lowering requirements in order to get more live bodies in front of classrooms and children. Recruiters were reporting the elimination of credential requirements, some suggesting desperately that if a candidate had even a few college credits in the subject they too would be acceptable. I reacted wondering: how far do we lower our standards before we negatively affect our students?
The real problem facing schools today is one I wrote about in “A Teachers Quest 2.0 Serving Students and Saving the Schools.”
New teachers choose to take night school classes at their Universities, then jump through the hoops of state requirements, and spend more years in training to be educators. After they finally persevere through Phase One and Phase Two of Student Teaching, these energetic, idealistic, and very bright people (some young and some, like me, not so young) earn the right to educate our children, and yet when they arrive in the real world of the classroom they find the environment they must work in too crushing and cruel, and statistically more than half of them quit their calling in the first 3-5 years. This crushing and cruel environment is what should be investigated.
BOOKS
What I do
01.
A Teacher's Quest: Serving Students and Saving The Schools
Brian L. Murphy's first degree was in Business Management which led to an eighteen year career, performing as an individual contributor, then a supervisor, then as a manager. Now, having been a teacher for twenty years, and experiencing the educational process from the inside, including being a Mentor Teacher for a dozen Student Teachers, he says: "I have loved being a teacher. But my industry is in trouble even dying, and something needs to be done to repair the damage before it's too late. This book is meant to identify and take responsibility for what is going wrong so we can remedy the problems."
02.
Auras; A Story of Love
The committee had been formed decades ago, by well-intentioned men, seeking positive change in the world. On July 23, 1976. What one faction called a solution, others would call mass murder. Brian Murphy’s debut novel “Auras, a Story of lLove” is a fast-paced tale about relationships told during a time, when smoking, was allowed on airplanes, and when joining a Silicon Valley “start up“ meant something. Here is when one young gun will learn how to be a friend, that evil comes in many shades, and what it means to sense auras in order to discern the truth.
