Word: worley
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Everybody agreed that James Worley, head of the English department at big (1,160 students) Fox Lane High School near Mount Kisco, N.Y., was just about the finest teacher they knew. And academic standards are high in the suburban Westchester County area, home of many a well-heeled Manhattan commuter with an eye on Harvard for his son. But last week able, balding Teacher Worley, 38, was fired. Reason: he refused to file lesson plans with the front office two weeks ahead of class...
...Worley blew his stack over an irritation familiar to many a classroom teacher -the seeming fondness of administrators for more and more paper work. Fox Lane teachers have always submitted outlines during the summer of what they plan to teach in the new year. Last year they also began filing achievement summaries at the end of each month, plus a plan for the next week. This year, when the teachers were ordered to tack on another week, Worley refused. His lessons, said he, were geared to the daily attitudes of his students. Submitting a detailed plan was "meaningless, a sham...
...night hearing in the school auditorium, Worley forcefully stated his case before 700 spectators. Principal Arthur B. Shedd argued that lesson plans were not inflexible, just a guide for substitute teachers. Worley saw it differently: "I concede the right of administrators to compel me to guard the footbridge on the day of football games, to patrol the boys' washrooms, and to supervise night basketball games. However irksome I might consider those demands, they do not trespass on the one area of education that is mine alone-the classroom. As long as my competency is accepted, I am the expert...
Last week the school board ruled that Teacher Worley, however competent, "took this matter into his own hands . . . in our opinion, professional competence cannot be adduced as a rationalization for insubordinate behavior...
...week's end (he is appealing to the State Tenure Commission), Worley was not sorry for his stand. "Controls by administrators," said he, "are a scab on a festering sore that hinders imaginative teaching." Twelve parents promptly hired him to tutor their children. Scholar Jacques Barzun, provost of Columbia University, wrote a warm personal note: "In a period when the rarity of good teaching is notorious and likely to increase, it is a rash administrator who would dismiss a competent and reliable teacher solely on the ground of not following to the letter a secondary obligation in the form...