Friday, September 25, 2009

the failure of excellence

I was raised with the expectation that excellence would be rewarded.

"Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."

I understood this to mean that if you do something well, if you excel, you will succeed. Many anecdotes, comments, proverbs all reinforced this idea.

So, I have been laid off my teaching job.

I am an excellent teacher. I know this from student comments, student evaluation scores, and from seeing my students go on and continue to succeed.

So why wasn't this enough?

You can say it's the economy (it is), you can say it is the ridiculous tenure system (it is), but I still feel betrayed.

1 comment:

Megan said...

Oh, how that sucks. I'm sorry, Lisa.
I often think that most proverbs should end with, "...but remember you can always get hit by a literal or metaphorical bus." Think how much better that would prepare people for life. "A stitch in time saves nine, but remember you can always get hit by a bus." "The early bird gets the worm, but remember you can always get hit by a bus." Then these proverbs would be closer to true, because they'd give us advice while preparing us for a world that only sort of plays by the rules.
Stupid economy and tenure system.