This conversation needs changing

I have read way too many blog posts, discussion board comments, letters to the editor, and so on that deal with the issue of teachers looking for an increase in pay in one district or another (i.e., Stafford County teachers working to the rule because they got nothing in terms of any pay increase this year). The language of these things always goes one of two ways. Either someone feels the need to call teachers onto the carpet, usually citing: a) the amount of time off they get, including summer vacation; b) the number of hours they work during a day, which, when you think about it, makes teaching a part-time job; and c) that it's no shock to anyone that teachers get lousy pay and since they chose the profession, they should suck it up and deal.

The other side of the argument takes a two-pronged approach. First, someone, usually a teacher, teacher's spouse, or parent of an elementary school student (it's always the little kids) points out how much time outside of the classroom teachers spend working on lesson plans, grading papers, or coaching a team; adds up the amount of money that teachers pay out of pocket for classroom supplies; and that essentially teachers take care of the children and the children are the future.

This conversation, btw? It's been going on since I was in high school and my father heard a constant chorus of "my taxes pay your salary" from parents who didn't like that their precious delinquents weren't passing his bio class. His responses were often more colorful than mine usually are in situations like that--then again, he had tenure.

But I digress. I'm getting very sick of seeing this play out in public forums because it's gotten us nowhere. I'd venture to guess that most of the complaining that teachers do about pay has more to do with respect than it has to do with actually making money. I mean, of course we want to make more money but that can apply to just about anyone in any profession. And since salary commands respect, the push for better pay for teachers is really a push for respect. Since it's all tied into property taxes and controlled by an ever-bloated bureaucracy, the public gets more of a say in whether or not that salary goes up than at, say, a software company.

As much as I am sick of hearing some ignorant blowhard try to break down the hours I work and tell me that I actually deserve less because nobody he knows works 6 hours a day (you know, when you subtract planning periods and 20 minutes for lunch), I am sick of reading posts and letters about how much work teachers take home with them, and how much is done outside the classroom. I'm sick of hearing people defend my profession by pointing out all of the bullshit that we have to put up with, from asinine administrative policies (usually created by asinine administrators) to NCLB. Because no other profession on earth has pointy-haired bosses?

Going tit for tat is about as counterproductive as me starting an argument with my wife over who does more dishes or is up more nights feeding the baby. It gets us nowhere and three months later we'd be having the same argument about the same crap, just as every year when school-budgetpalooza comes around I hear about all of the things people in my profession "do." Because you're not helping. In fact, you're perpetuating the notion that teachers should be sympathized with and that feeling leads to condescending crap like Teacher Appreciation Week.

I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me because it makes me a second-class citizen or minor player in this whole drama and takes away any voice I may have at the table as well as any ability for me to start an intelligent conversation on this topic, rather than a stupid, stupid, stupid back and forth. How will a conversation like that go? I honestly have no idea because the noise is still too much for me to hear myself think, but if anyone in my profession ever wants to feel respected, it has to start soon.

A step in the right direction

Cali. Journalism Teachers Protected

The state Assembly has approved a bill to protect high school and college journalism teachers from retaliation by administrators upset by stories or editorials.

The legislation by Sen. Leland Yee makes it illegal to dismiss, transfer or discipline teachers who are protecting students' free speech rights.

The bill was sent back to the Senate on Monday on a 47-2 vote.

While this is no means the passing of a law, it shows that someone is looking out for student rights, especially the right to free speech. If I were a Constitutional lawyer of any sort, I think my Everest would be Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, especially considering that it gives principals and administrators too much power. There were a few times when I was a newspaper adviser that I had stories questioned or nixed because it made the school "look bad." That really shouldn't be allowed in my opinion because doesn't teaching students that they have the right to express themselves and then saying "well, within reason" sound a tad hypocritical (or at least annoyingly right-wing)?

I'm not that hopeful for the state actually making this a law, and I'm sure that the "teachers can be fired for poor performance"--poor performance being a rather arbitrary thing--will be the thing that makes a law like this impotent, but at least someone's doing something.

The Load-Out/Stay

One of the things that made me laugh this morning is that this school, which I leave today, is where I have spent the most time in one place since graduating college nine years ago. My prior record was 2-1/4 years at a telecom consulting firm from which I was laid off back in 2003.

My flighty, job-hopping work history aside, it always does feel weird to leave a place of your own volition, and leaving my first school feels odd because I leave behind quite a few people I genuinely respect as colleagues and have come to know as friends.

Too many people in this profession use the graduation analogy to describe how they feel about leaving the school they're teaching at. You know what I mean: "Oh, this is my graduation too!" I guess it fits but in a Successories-poster sort of way. I prefer to think of leaving a job as leaving summer camp. You promise you'll stay in touch with everyone but a few years down the road you write to maybe a couple of people and by the time a decade has gone by you're bored one Tuesday night and find yourself on Facebook looking for someone whose name you barely remember.

Personally, I've made the right decision. I'll save money on gas and I'll definitely save time. I'll be teaching in a much smaller, much more rural county, which will definitely be different but this time I don't have the wrong idea about my new community. First, I live in said county, but second, it's also not the clusterfuck that the greater Fredericksburg area is. During the past three years as I've had conversations with parents, dealt with the PTO, and read the voices of the community in the venerable (HA!) Free-Lance Star, I've never seen a place more ignorant. Of its population, of its problems, of what it needs to do to be part of the 21st Century. There's a bury-your-head-in-the-sand, stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears mentality when it comes to so much and while I don't like to use phrases like "hurts students" or "shortchanges children," that's exactly what happens.

When they're not ignorant, the community is intolerant and by and large either patronizes people in my profession or flat-out vilifies them. That's why when I look at heroes here I have to look at most of my colleagues, who accomplish what they accomplish despite all of that. Not everyone in my building is excellent--some I want to throttle at faculty meetings--but for the most part, I've worked with people who do what they can with what they have and know that nailing themselves to a cross is counterproductive, especially when there is a job to be done.

Platitudes are not my thing but I really love how much I've learned these past three years from my fellow teachers: both veterans and rookies. Being able to bounce ideas off of other people and being treated with respect is something that's truly inspiring, and something I will never discount. While I'm sad to go, I'm happy to move on to another challenge, and I feel like I'm prepared to take on another school and another staff.

That being said, I'm looking forward to summer--taking care of my son, writing, doing what I can to lose the weight I've gained since starting here ... it's going to be fun.

My Life as a Coffee Monkey

[note: I submitted this for publication earlier this year and was turned down, so here's one from the reject pile, if you will]

“Well, this is awkward,” my student said as we faced one another across the counter. I shrugged and handed her the latte she ordered.

Of course it was awkward. When I started teaching I never thought I would have to take a second job at Starbucks, and even when I had to, I assumed I would never see one of my students because I live 90 minutes from my high school. But she happened to be passing through on her way to a Barack Obama rally, so I was forced to take part in an embarrassing role reversal: serving someone who should really be serving me.

At this point, I had been serving coffee for nearly two months in an effort to keep my cash flow up and my credit card debt low. Assuming I’d never have to ever do this was arrogant and not having to work a second job for most of my first two years of teaching bolstered my cockiness. But a newborn coupled with astronomical gas prices had me spending a Saturday afternoon driving around Charlottesville applying to every retail chain I could think of. Starbucks was at the top of my list—it was a small place and I was a frequent customer, plus the company had a very good reputation as far as treating their part-timers went. They hired me on the spot and if I hadn’t swallowed my pride already, I did the following Monday when I put on a green apron and begin my Barista training, or and I liked to joke, being a “coffee monkey.”

Learning how to pour the perfect cup of coffee is not like analyzing symbolism in A Raisin in the Sun. For two weeks, I did my best to memorize and entire book’s worth of coffee recipes: hot coffee drinks, iced coffee drinks, and coffee and non-coffee Frappuccino blended drinks. Nowhere in my manager and shift supervisor's teaching was differentiated group work and critical thinking, and the technology-centered instruction entailed learning how to work the register and the cappuccino machine. Proficiency meant that I’d gotten things down or hadn’t and assessment purely authentic: my shift supervisor Kristin would tell me to make a caffe mocha (mark the cup, pump the syrup, heat the milk, pull the shot, pour the milk, add whipped cream, sleeve and lid, call the drink) and would make me do it over when I got it wrong. She would also frequently quiz me on recipe facts, like how many pumps of syrup went into a venti vanilla latte (five) and where to pour the water on a chai latte (to the siren’s eye). Most of my co-workers were college students who did like to discuss literature and art; however, when a soccer mom’s macchiato needed to be perfect, we all knew our place.

I made an effort never to say that I was too good for the job, and the idea that anything is beneath me or I am beneath anyone has only reared its head when someone on the other side of the counter would hear me talking about my day at school. “Oh, you’re a teacher,” they’d say with the same tone that’s usually reserved for terminal cancer patients. I was polite—after all, it was a customer—but facing that sentiment never sat right. I didn’t know exactly how to rationalize it except to say that I now think that kids working behind counters get a raw deal from adults. I lost count of the number of times I had to stifle my impatience when a customer walked up to my register and didn’t clearly say what he or she wanted, and when presented with the wrong drink got testy. You see, it’s not that teenagers don’t have attitude problems sometimes—trust me, I spend my days with nearly 1300 of them—it’s that complaining adults often confuse “the customer is always right” with the right to be a jackass. They’ll say it’s just them taking out other frustrations on you, and I’m enough of a professional not to throttle anyone, but a 17-year-old is not so adept.

My nights of serving self-absorbed customers made me want to straighten out their self-absorbed kids. As I slugged it out behind the counter, I made a personal vow not to let them grow up to be the soccer moms who came bursting in on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted and genuinely surprised that the hundreds of people who were watching their six-year-old’s tournament weren’t flooding us with orders for hot chocolate. For every experienced coffee drinker’s dry cappuccino there was a “large, skinny ... is that the right word? I don’t know. Does the vanilla have a lot of fat in it? Okay, I’ll have a large vanilla latte.”

It’s a harsh assessment, sure, but these are the same people who plan things like “McDonald’s Night”—where teachers work the counter at a McDonald’s in an effort to raise money—without realizing how condescending that is. I truly wound up with a lot of sympathy for my students. Not enough to ease up on homework assignments or anything, but enough not to throw a fit when I’m on the customer side of things and my order is messed up. Those parents, who would turn me into a sideshow to raise money, I wanted to forget.

When the awkwardness had passed, my student took her drink and left without saying anything. A few weeks ago, she asked me if I was still working there; I related how I quit the next day because the hours were interfering with my spending time with my family and I was falling very behind at my other, more important career. So I never did make Barista, but next year I will be teaching closer to home. And if I’m ever put on the spot, I’m sure I can throw together a half-caf venti nonfat three-pump cinnamon dolce latte with room.

And the lowlights

Posts like this will not help me get motivational speaking gigs.

Anyway, with all but one of my final exams out of the way and everything off the walls and things being packed into boxes, I've been doing the usual thinking about how the year went. I feel like it was "off" in some way. Yeah, there were highlights and those were good, but generally I'm leaving this, my third year, feeling that I don't have much "prowess" as a teacher.

Then again, are you supposed to? Well, I guess you're supposed to have enough to acquire continuing contract/tenured status but then again you should assume you're going to mess things up at least once or twice (usually, btw, this happens in a Murphy's Law sort of fashion--the one time you screw things up it involves a parent who doesn't realize that a teacher's being fallible is a strength and not a weakness). And even though I came into this profession as a career switcher and therefore had a little more perspective than your typical starry-eyed college grad, I still understand why the attrition rate for rookie-level teachers is so high.

I taught four different courses this year: Journalism I (an intro course), Newspaper Production, Yearbook Production, and English 11 Inclusion. Each of them had moments wherein I was ready to come to school armed and start picking people off one by one. And while part of it is only so much under my control--we can market all we want but when you see that the percentage of the school's population that buys a yearbook is about the same that participates in activities and sports, then you understand how uphill this can be--part of it definitely is.

I made what is quite possibly the dumbest mistake of my career this year; I overestimated how smart my students were. No, seriously. In both Journalism I and inclusion English (I knew how smart my yearbook and newspaper staffs were because most of them were returning students), I assumed that most of the students in those classes had a certain amount of basic knowledge that would allow them to a) comprehend things at or near grade-level; b) comprehend a set of directions; and c) have basic control of their bowels.

Two out of three ain't bad.

First, the at or near grade-level thing. I'd understood the nature of inclusion--about half the class is regular-level English students and half of the class is comprised of students with accommodations, most of which are watched over by your inclusion teacher (who the special ed department took great pains to drill into our heads was not an intern or gopher). Now maybe I didn't grasp the concept but I had thought that since the inclusion students were given extra support, they would be able to keep up with what's considered a normal-paced English class. It took me a few weeks to figure out that several students were in the class because they were close but not quite remedial. So I had to slow the class down, shift some of the assignments, and eventually completely stopped assigning homework.

Look, I know homework is, like, the root of all evil in the educational system or something but I couldn't even assign quality homework assignments or reading assignments. We had to read everything together, aloud, in class ... something I always was told was what good teachers DON'T do (well, at least by all those "every way you were taught is wrong" people who haven't seen the business end of a classroom in 20 years) and I found tedious when I was in high school. Compound all this with the fact that I'd taught advanced English the previous year and had to re-invent the wheel again, I had an ENORMOUS chip on my shoulder when it came to inclusion.

On the Journalism I side of things, most of the stuff I did came together pretty well and I was able to teach some pretty cool lessons. But then there were the times I wanted to claw my eyes out because I had to deal with students whose highest achievement in life consisted of being able to turn oxygen into carbon dioxide. A week ago, I had one of my dead-in-the-water students walk into my room and ask me how to do our current events journal--an assignment that was not only due May 19 but that we'd been doing all year. Back in March when I was having students record their narrations for our photojournalism movie (another entry to come on that), I spent half my time telling the other students in the class to shut up. In fact, one was so loud that she could be clearly heard on another student's recording. Oh, and she wondered why I knocked points off of her grade for it.

And you know what's funny? The biggest problem here, in all of this, was clearly me. And I don't mean that sarcastically. I mean, I could go on and on about not having enough time int he day and having to buy my own supplies and use all of the nail-myself-to-the-cross language that everyone in this profession uses. But I knew back in November that there was no use in that. I got over myself really quickly when it came to inclusion-level English and approached it from a different perspective--I was teaching reading and writing, not literature. That sounds elementary, my dear Watson, but you'd be surprised at how many teachers--especially young teachers--approach a class like 11th grade English and try to teach it like a survey of American literature course. With journalism, I focused on those who I was getting good discussions and material out of and let the chips fall where they may. That sounds like I left students behind or something and I probably did ... but dumbing down an elective course for those who can't bother paying attention for two seconds? Not my bag, baby.

I had several pain-in-the-ass students this year; however, with the exception of a very small handful whom really stopped showing up or simply slept through the second half of the year, most were nice students who just needed a kick in the ass to get going. I try to look at it not from the "look at the shit I have to put up with" angle, but from the "what can I do next time" angle. Yes, there are instances from this year where I think that I could have done something better or done way much more if only I gave more of a crap (because honestly, there were days where the fact that I had to teach those classes made me violently angry) but I would rather take what I learned for next year than dwell on the load I had to bear this year.

What a Concept!

My wife sent this my way and it's the funniest thing I've read all morning ...

Book Rental Service?


Enjoy!

Hitting the Highlights: Top 10 Things That Were Great About This Year

See? I'm not always such a cynical bastard.

1. Teaching students about national tragedies. I love how that sounds just really sick and twisted. But this year in journalism I turned my attention to how large-scale events are covered. One was the Virginia Tech massacre, which was a discussion not of the tragedy of the event but the media coverage. Much earlier in the year, I did a three-week mini-unit on September 11 that focused on not just the media coverage and bias/non-bias in the media but the cultural aspect of it. Over the summer I'll probably do an entire entry or two as a "stuff that works" thing because I was really proud of what I did with that unit.

2. Being jealous of next year's yearbook staff. One of the things I'm pretty determined to do as I leave my school is make sure that the 2009 yearbook staff is as off and running as they can be. So far, they're doing what I hoped, as they have templates completed and a cover idea. The cover and theme idea is really cool and even little stuff like the folio looks pretty wicked. I told next year's editor-in-chief that although leaving for another school was the right decision, personally, I was definitely jealous that I wasn't going to be the adviser on what's definitely going to be a kickass book next year.

3. A Raisin in the Sun. I started teaching this last year when I didn't like the core texts on our 11th grade reading list, but this year it really came together. The students connected with the text, and had a fun time reading it in class. We were also able to do some higher-level stuff with the play--connecting it to popular culture in a way that goes beyond simple comprehension of the plot, something I rarely got out of my inclusion students. As a bonus, their scores on the unit test were through the roof.

4. Co-teaching a lesson on bias in the media. Though it was rushed and constantly interrupted by my SOL proctoring obligations, I thought that Penelope and I did a pretty good job.

5. Contributing to another English teacher's To Kill a Mockingbird unit. She was teaching Mockingbird right around the time the Jena 6 controversy was taking place in Louisiana. Despite the local paper's neglect of the story, it was pretty well-covered and I was able to send a few political cartoons, some stories from the Washington Post, and even the video to John Mellencamp's song, "Jena," her way. In fact, I wound up covering her class the day she showed it ... good timing, that.

6. Centering my Journalism I bias in media lessons around "news" in the Free-Lance Star. Because it's fun to point out how horrible that paper is.

7. Putting together a killer last issue of the student newspaper. I wasn't too wild about the cover, but I thought our content was solid and was genuinely touched by the tribute my staff had put together.

8. Watching the seniors who were on my original yearbook staff graduate. They started as yearbook staffers the year I started teaching and while this is really sentimental, their graduating really is special because they're the first group of students I really came to know for more than the course of a single school year. Lasting impressions and all that.

9. The Things They Carried. We did this as an after-SOL assignment in English and I felt that at least a few of my students, who normally wouldn't give a crap, actually enjoyed reading it. Then again, when you have images like necklaces made of human tongues and people getting getting shot straight through the head, you're bound to get someone interested. Seriously, though? I think that Tim O'Brien's book should be on a lot more English curricula. It's engaging and topical, especially to a generation that's become the face of the latest war.

10. The photojournalism moviemaker project. This is another that will get the "stuff that works" treatment, but I had my students research famous news photographs and then record narration for their photo in what became a 50-minute lesson on the history and importance of those pictures. Definitely something I enjoyed showing and they enjoyed watching when it was done.

Well, graduation is today, and then there are four days of underclass exams followed by a work day and I'm done with teaching here. More to come on that.