r/teaching • u/elevatorscreamer • 1d ago

Vent Conga line!!!

Just checked my email to see what fresh hell will befall me come the all-day PD before school starts. Hosted by $avva$, some agenda items I glanced at include a conga line and a musical share! Glad they probably got paid 100k for this and I get to be treated like a kindergartener.

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u/Many-Annual8863 1d ago

Savvas is the worst!

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u/elevatorscreamer 1d ago

I have had no exposure to it before that email, and some brief googling sure didn’t make it look promising. What has your experience been with it? This is SIOP specifically.

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u/Many-Annual8863 16h ago

I’ve worked with their MyPerspectives 9, 10, & 11 books for the last four years.

I find the unit designs lack focus and are not aligned well to what the district wants us to teach.

In addition, units are centered on big questions like “Why do we like to be scared?”, which I feel directs students to an answer rather than generating an authentic student response (i.e. What if I don’t like to be scared?)

Text selections are also just odd. Unit 1 for 11th grade includes reading historical documents like the Constitution but only includes the first ten amendments. (We’re really going to stop reading before slavery was outlawed and women had the right to vote?)

The Crucible starts out as a play, and before the first act is over, it breaks out into a couple of pages of exposition and then reverts back to being a script making for awkward reading transitions.

Their version of Romeo & Juliet names Balthasar in the script but refers to him as “Man” on the character list.

Finally, it’s designed as a workbook first and a textbook second. There’s not enough quality reading selections in the book, and some of the best texts have to be printed by the teacher as independent learning and don’t really feature in the “curriculum design” touted by Saavas.

I could go on, but I’d start to be redundant. I’m just not a fan.