I look at my calendar. It’s still July. Are these people insane? Do I want to go be trapped in a house with two people I don’t know at all and work on curriculum in July?
I plead family obligations—it is the first time in my tenure at Better Than You, but not the last, that I will invoke my daughter, Rowen, as an excuse to have a life. Summer is my time to be a full-time parent, (lying) I couldn’t possibly get away, but maybe we can talk about this stuff over the phone! Or maybe I can just stick a fork in my eyeball!
So Kathleen and Roberta both get on the phone, and they ask me some stuff about ninth grade, and I am way too intimidated to participate in the conversation in any kind of meaningful way. I mean, I just got hired—am I going to say, “No, that’s not the way I would do things, no, I think that’s wrong”? Of course not. Well, a more confident person might. But I’m not that guy, so in hopes of ingratiating myself, I lamely agree to whatever they say.
But also, in the back of my mind, there is my experience everywhere else I’ve ever worked, where the curriculum is pretty fictional and nobody has time to supervise you. I have gotten pretty far by smiling and agreeing with people and then going off and doing what I want. Maybe it’s just because I’m afraid of conflict. Whatever the case, they say some things I don’t really agree with, and I just kind of smile and nod, or do whatever equivalent of that can be heard over the phone at your beach house where you’re having a sleepover to work on curriculum, you freak.
So that’s not good.
My friend Andrew knows some woman who used to work at Better Than You, so he gives me her number.
I call her up. “Hi, my name’s Brendan Halpin, I’m a friend of Andrew’s. Did he mention that I might be calling?”
I get a frosty “No. He didn’t” and realize that my intro was way too vague and she is right now thinking about how exactly to kick Andrew’s ass for giving her number out to a dateless loser, so I quickly explain the situation and try to work in in the first thirty seconds the fact that I have a wife and kid (so I’m not looking for a date, see), and I want to have a life, and I’m just wondering if working at Better Than You will allow me to do this.
She hems and haws and is polite enough to not want to say things that are too terrible, because, you know, I am going to be working there, but the impression I get is no, it’s not going to be possible to have a life at Better Than You.
This impression is reinforced when I go in one day to talk to Roberta, who is back from the Cape and sitting alone in a classroom studying last year’s scores on the Stanford 9, a standardized reading and math test that Better Than You students and all other high school students in Boston take every year. This meeting with her is something I agreed to in order to avoid having to go to the Cape. Anyway, Roberta starts out by talking about the way the school operates: teachers really have a voice in making policy; they create the schedule and vote on the budget and essentially get a voice in shaping every aspect of how the school runs. Hardly anybody in any profession has this much power in their workplace, and it’s certainly unheard-of in schools, where teachers usually only have the power to complain bitterly about another terrible administrative decision. It really is an incredibly bold experiment, and I am starting to get really excited just thinking that I get to be a part of it.
But then Roberta starts going on and on about Stanford 9 scores, and I don’t really care about Stanford 9 scores, and then she says something about how it’s really great that Friday’s faculty meetings sometimes go till seven or eight at night, and I just about fall over. She goes on to explain that the actual meetings only go until five (like that’s any kind of relief. Five o’clock on Friday! Jesus!) and then everybody goes over to T. J. Dickweed’s Family Fare and Pub to get loaded. “We work hard, and we play hard,” she says.
She also talks about how everybody has a “Better Than You moment” when they freak out and feel like they can’t possibly do it and break down. This she views as a positive and important rite of passage. She then goes on to talk about how great the place is in general.
Having worked in a lot of different situations already, I am suspicious of this kind of enthusiasm. There’s always something wrong. But no, Roberta pretty much feels that this place is heaven on earth, and this conversation has done nothing to assuage my Step-ford Wives fears.
What is up with the freaks who work here? I’ll know soon, as I’m about to become one.
42
Part of what I’ve been hired to do here at Better Than You is to help set up a transition program for ninth-graders. It seems that many ninth-graders have been coming to Better Than You and failing everything in their first year and usually leaving the school during or after their second year.
I have never seen this fact mentioned in any of the fawning articles about Better Than You that appear regularly in both local and national publications. In fact, I learn, this year’s senior class of twenty-two started as a freshman class of sixty-six. I guess mentioning this fact would ruin the story of how this school is reinventing urban education.
So if the local press has been asleep at the switch on this, at least, to their credit, the people inside Better Than You have not. They got grants to create this program to help kids who are coming in here with low skills to not fail everything their first year and to adjust to the demands of a college-prep school.
So far, so good. I mean, it is actually very encouraging, because every place I’ve ever worked has had problems, and this is really the first place where I’ve seen that a bunch of people actually got together and tried to do something to try to solve the problem rather than just complaining that these kids just don’t get it. I remember very clearly a conversation I had with a history teacher at Northton High: he was complaining about how terrible it is that the kids these days can’t read like they used to, and it’s that goddamn whole-language crap they teach them at the elementary schools, and then they do all this project crap over at the middle school, and now I have a class full of kids who can’t read! In an uncharacteristic attack of boldness I said to him, “Okay, maybe it is the elementary school’s fault—but these are the kids you have sitting in front of you. What are you going to do differently for them? Maybe they shouldn’t come to you this way, but they do—so what are you going to do about it?” He looked at me like I was from space, because of course he was already doing all he was ever going to do about it, which was bitching about the elementary and middle schools.
So I am impressed that Better Than You has recognized a problem and decided to do something about it. I am even more impressed when I meet the people I’m supposed to work with: Jessie, the other English teacher, Alison and Sydney, the math teachers, and Lisa, the study-skills teacher. I like them immediately, and we all go out for Indian food on the first day of our meetings, and I just feel great about working here—I am in a room with four people I like, four people who obviously care about kids, four people who believe in working hard. This already pretty much matches the total number of people who really care about kids at any other school I’ve ever worked in, and I haven’t even met most of the rest of the faculty yet.
Somewhat worrisome, though, is the fact that Lisa is the only person here who was on the committee that put the grant together last year. Everybody else who was on the committee left. Alison has agreed to be the lead teacher of this program, but she wasn’t in on the planning. Sydney and Jessie, like me, are new to Better Than You.
So where did everybody go? What happened last year? Nobody will really say. Apparently the entire history department left to go start another school, and a bunch of other teachers just left. Lisa says something about how it was a difficult year, and that there were a lot of hard feelings when the old principal left (though getting rid of anybody who had faculty meetings till five on Fridays seems to me like it could only have been a good thing) and there may be some kind of racial element to these hard feelings, as the guy who left, or was forced out, was African-American, and the new principal
is a thirty-year-old white guy with five years of teaching experience.
So this makes me nervous. As does all the work we have to do this week. We have to plan ninth-grade orientation and then run ninth-grade orientation and also figure out what exactly this program is going to look like, because a lot of the stuff that was in the original proposal has to be jettisoned.
This is stuff that Alison and Lisa leak out slowly over the first few days, but apparently there was significant opposition to the creation of a transition program from people who thought that it was groovy that so many students fell by the wayside because it proved that we had high standards. This group was, perhaps not surprisingly, led by Kathleen Shaughnessy. So when the original proposal became the final plan, all kinds of stuff got changed. We were originally supposed to have more time than the other ninth-grade English classes, but that got nixed. We were also supposed to have some freedom to create our own curriculum, but that too got nixed. So what emerges here is that we have to somehow bring some of these kids up several grade levels in one year, while doing exactly the same work in exactly the same amount of time as the other ninth-grade classes.
Now I’m feeling kind of leery about the fact that it looks like we’ve been set up to fail. We’ve been given an impossible mandate and no tools to accomplish it, so then when we fail, the people who were against it all along can say, “See? It doesn’t work!”
This is pretty much the attitude of Kathleen Shaughnessy, who takes Jessie and me out for coffee one day, essentially to say that she doesn’t believe in the program, and she thinks we’ll basically end up telling some kids that they are in this for five years instead of four, and that this year will be a sort of tune-up for the ninth grade. Which is totally not what it’s supposed to be. I just smile and nod, because this woman is incredibly intimidating. Everything she says comes from this rock-solid certainty that she is completely right, and it is very difficult to argue with that, especially if you only just kind of suspect that you are right. And, you know, she started the school and she’s my boss. So I am trying not to piss her off.
After our coffee, Jessie and I go back to our planning meeting, and we all spend the afternoon talking about how Kathleen is this giant pain in the ass, and she wants the program to fail, and blah blah blah. I guess it’s not very productive, but it feels good. Having a common enemy has really helped us all to start cohering as a unit.
And then a funny thing happens. I want a pin. I mean, I really want a pin. I see other people wearing their pins, and I want to wear one too. Only a week ago I was entertaining fantasies about refusing to wear the pin and seeing what would happen, but now—try and stop me! Kathleen and Roberta and their weirdness aside, I feel happy and lucky to be working with such great people, and when I put my pin on, I feel really proud of the place I work for the first time in my whole career.
43
Ninth-grade orientation and faculty orientation have been scheduled for almost the exact same times, which is a brilliant (and, unfortunately, all too characteristic) organizational move. So I am running a lot of the student-orientation activities (we are having the kids do things that will help us decide which ones will be in the transition program), then looking over the results of the writing samples after everybody is gone, and going to ridiculous faculty-orientation meetings in the meantime; school hasn’t even started yet, and I’m already busting my ass for nine hours a day and coming home exhausted.
The faculty orientation, not surprisingly, is a horrifying waste of time. Most of it consists of people telling us how great the school is, and it’s very short on practical information. So we get Kathleen Shaughnessy recounting, moist-eyed, the origin myth of Better Than You Charter High School: how she and our invisible co-founder, Rachael, worked together in an urban school, and how their classrooms had a connecting door, and how they used to see stupid things happen and horrible decisions being made, especially the case of Juan Diaz, who was simultaneously enrolled in both of their English classes, though one taught ninth-grade English and the other taught eleventh-grade English, and how they just knew that teachers knew what they were doing and could be trusted to run a school, and they worked for months putting together the application, and their dream is now a reality all around them. Or, at least, all around Kathleen. Rachael draws a salary from Better Than You working from her home 250 miles away in New York—nice work if you can get it, I guess.
When the time comes to decide which kids are going to be in the transition program, the transition department, along with Kathleen, Roberta, and a couple of other math teachers, stays at school until eight o’clock making the selections. I leave at four-thirty to pick up Rowen at her preschool, but I feel guilty about leaving these other people to pick up the slack for me.
This is something I have to get over, because throughout the year, I will usually be the first person out of the building when I leave at four-thirty. This is a sharp contrast to Northton, where I would usually be the last person to leave at three-thirty. So even though I now work about twenty-four miles closer to home than I used to, I’m not getting home any earlier. This is how you can tell we are educationally innovative.
Although I’m nervous about the ethic of overwork here at Better Than You, I still feel really deeply that I am home. Here I am doing what I’ve most wanted to do ever since I started teaching, and I’m doing it with people I like. At the end of our orientation week we are all invited to a barbecue at the house of one of the science teachers who lives in a suburb about a half hour from Boston. Now, I went to a couple of events attended by a large chunk of the faculty at Northton, and they always made me feel like impaling myself on an hors-d’oeuvre toothpick, but this feels different.
And it is. I drive out to Al the science teacher’s house with Kirsten and Rowen, and we go hang out in the backyard. Al greets us warmly—at one point he takes me aside and tells me that the school is really lucky to have me and he is really excited to work with me, and this just makes me glow. Al has put together a really awesome spread of food, and I’m amazed to find that I’m having a great time. I get stuck talking to Kathleen for a few minutes, but even that isn’t too painful. I just really like most of the people here. Rowen and I play games rolling down the hill, people are playing bocce, and the atmosphere is much nicer than most parties I’ve ever been to. And this is a work party. I mean, under the best of circumstances people usually go to these things out of a sense of obligation, but I am here having actual unfeigned fun.
At the end of the evening, as the sun is going down, Chip, our new principal, distributes little strips of paper to everybody on the staff who is there. (The principal is here socializing with the staff, and it doesn’t appear to be too painful for either party! Amazing!) He has us all stand in a circle and take turns reading the little scraps. They turn out to be pieces of a couple of Langston Hughes poems and some other inspirational stuff. Yes, my alarm bells are ringing, this is corny, this is a joke, but I’m powerless against Chip’s sincerity—my initial discomfort, as well as my precious skepticism and cynicism, turn to gooey sentimentality pretty quickly. After everybody has read their little scrap of paper, Chip gives a little speech about what great, important work we do, and how lucky we are to be able to do it.
I kind of stagger back to the car. It’s just too much. The principal seems to respect the staff, and everybody seems to really understand that we’re here to serve the kids. I can’t imagine even the wildest apocalyptic scenario causing something like this to happen anywhere else I’ve ever worked.
I always imagined it could be like this. And now it is. I am really part of something special.
44
The buzz I got from Al’s party and from my initial meetings with the transition department never really goes away, even though the rest of the year manages to be really difficult.
Actually, the work with the kids is mostly just normally difficult. But despite the fact that I like and respect most of my colleagues, the work with the grown-ups
kind of sucks.
For one thing, the cult of the meeting is in full effect here. The transition department meets once a week, and this, by and large, is pretty useful and necessary time, since we’re planning and building a new program, talking about all the students, and reporting back to their parents about how they’re doing.
The full faculty also meets once a week. These meetings are far less useful. Occasionally we make policy, but mostly we have departments presenting stuff to one another, or long philosophical discussions. They never really go till five, but they start at one-thirty on Friday afternoon and frequently go till three-thirty or four. Why do we need to meet weekly? I guess it’s because other schools meet only monthly. Or maybe because, in the early years of the school, the entire staff (all five of them) met for hours every morning while the students did gym and Spanish, so to people who’ve been here that long, meeting only once a week feels like a terrible cutback, but it is mostly a waste of time made doubly annoying by the fact that it takes place on Friday afternoons.
I don’t know how often this happens, but it seems like every Friday, a long-winded, superior science teacher ends up speechifying about some damn thing or another. The undertone of her speech is always that she hates white people, those of us in the room in particular, and we don’t know what we’re doing. (She, not surprisingly, chose not to attend Al’s party.) It’s unclear to me what she’s doing here if she hates everybody so much. Sometimes something she says will enrage Kathleen, who also is long-winded and superior, and so many Friday afternoons we are left with Kathleen and Wilhelmina making dueling strident speeches, and while there is a kind of grim amusement in watching these two go after each other, mostly I just wish they would both shut the hell up so I can go home.
Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Page 15