Sticky Widget

Recently, George Landes at Texas Teachers contacted me to ask if I would be interested in showing off a widget on my blog that showed salary grades for new and current teachers in Texas. I said sure, show me what ya got.

Here's some literature that he sent me, along with the widget itself. Go ahead and play with it. It's pretty neat.

A New Salary Tool for Texas Teachers
By: Texas Teachers

Texas Teachers, the state’s largest alternative certification program, has just launched a new online salary tool that can be embedded on any website, blog, or Facebook page. The free tool provides the latest salary information for Texas school districts and allows Texas teachers to easily access salary information that was once located in multiple locations on the Internet.
To make this information more accessible, Texas Teachers consolidated salary schedule information and spent several months developing the tool, which is available for public download via embeddable HTML code. The tool currently has approximately 316 ISDs represented in the tool’s database. Texas Teachers will be adding salary information throughout the year and welcomes districts to submit their salary schedule to be included.

To use the tool on your website or blog, visit http://www.texasteachers.org/resources/texas-teacher-salaries/. Simply copy and paste the embeddable HTML code into your blog or website.

Note: Texas Teachers will be adding functionality to the tool that allows for custom sizing of the tool.

Another rerun

Darnit, Thanksgiving Break will officially be over in just a few hours. Another workweek will begin, and there will be four more straight weeks of school before Christmas Break.

So since I have nothing original to write about tonight, AND with a disgraced and disbarred professional football player coming back into the fold, I thought I would repost a somewhat popular post from this past May.


Something occurred to me. I started thinking about athletes’ salaries. They are usually fixed when the contract is signed, but several years back, Ricky Williams -- running back out of the University of Texas -- made news by signing a very detailed agreement. He would effectively get paid by the carry, by the catch, by the touchdown, etc.

More recently, poor Ricky has made news for other things, but at the time, I thought the idea of his contract was pretty darn cool.

So let's apply it to teachers.

Sign us on at some base salary -- let's say $25,000. But we can increase our take-home by documenting events from the following list. Teachers would get paid for every occurrence of the event, not just one time.

Staff meeting .........................................................................................$200
Fire drill .................................................................................................$150
Being pulled out of class to
attend a meeting ..................................................................................$500
Receiving a new child any day
after the first day of class ....................................................................$1,000
-- if they don't speak English ..............................................................$2,500
Parent conference -- on the phone ...................................................$100
Parent conference -- in person ..........................................................$300
Parent conference – w/ irate orirrational parent ..................................................................................$750
Administering a standardized test ...................................................$250 per child
Child talking back ...............................................................................$25
Child cussing at you ............................................................................$75
Child flipping you the bird .................................................................$50
Child giving you the RING fingerand then saying, "What?!?
It's not the middle finger!
I never flipped the bird at you!!” .....................................................$49.50
Child whining, "They're skipping!”.................................................. $25
Child disrespecting your clothes ......................................................$10
Child disrespecting your hair ............................................................$15
Child disrespecting your car .............................................................$20
Child disrespecting yo momma ........................................................$150
Child threatening to harm you .........................................................$500
Child throwing and hitting you with:
an eraser .............................................................................................$100
a crayon ...............................................................................................$200
a pencil/pen ........................................................................................$500
a book ..................................................................................................$1,200
the student next to them .................................................................$7,500
Child slapping you .............................................................................$2,000
Child punching you ............................................................................$5,000
Child kicking you ...............................................................................$4,000
-- in the nads .....................................................................................$15,000

I'm sure that there are many other things they could be added to this contract. But I think that many teachers would agree to something that followed this kind of format. Heck, if I got paid $25 every time one of my kids cried, "They're skipping!" I'd be able to retire to the Caymans from this year alone!

So kudos to Ricky Williams for leading the way in performance-based contracts. Here's hoping it doesn't lead all of us teachers to smoking joints…