It’s just another school.
52
I spend three days with my departments working on curriculum, improving stuff that works, junking stuff that doesn’t. Nobody notices or says anything.
I, along with the rest of the transition department—Alison, Lisa, Hillary, a new math teacher, and Dinah, a new English teacher—plan ninth-grade orientation. It goes smoother than it ever has, except for the fact that Erik, the vice princ—I mean Dean of Yelling at Kids—is supposed to give out lockers and falls way behind and refuses to accept any help when Alison offers, so we have to send twenty kids home without lockers. The best part of the orientation is that some of our older students are here pitching in, and they are doing a fantastic job—they are helpful and mature and kind to the terrified ninth-graders. One senior—actually the same kid from my study hall who always asked after Kirstens health last year—says, “I’m just going to imagine that every one of these ninth-graders is my little brother.” We’re all unspeakably proud of them. No administrator notices or says anything.
Everybody else is in the Buzzword Institute training. It’s scheduled for ten hours over two days. Those of us who oversaw ninth-grade orientation come in three hours late, so we only get seven hours of training. The people doing schedules and computer setup are not excused, so they will have to work over Labor Day weekend in order to get this stuff ready for school. We all have rooms to set up, syllabuses to write, and classes to get in order, but we are not allowed to do any of that stuff here on the last two days before kids come in to school.
Now, the training is pretty typical. There is a glib guy—thankfully not the same asshole from last year but pretty much cut from the same cloth—with a strangely hostile undercurrent and an utterly typical condescending undercurrent who shows us lots of fancy PowerPoint slides about his company’s idea to revolutionize education, which they are doing because they care so much, and the twenty-five thousand dollars we’re paying them doesn’t hurt either.
I won’t bore you with any of the details—it’s bad enough that I have to suffer through this. None of the ideas are anything you could really argue with, though of course everything is oversimplified.
What I will tell you is that our glib, hostile, condescending presenter has never been a high school teacher.
Now, it’s demoralizing enough to be sitting here listening to ten hours of this guy’s system—oh, what the hell, I’ll tell you for free: all kids can learn, and you should make decisions about what you are doing based on data. If you happen to be a school superintendent, I will happily come and deliver this message to your staff in five minutes for only $12,500—please contact me care of my publisher—but it is just crushing to know that this guy is not now, nor has he ever been, a teacher.
Probably he calls himself an “educator.” It’s hard for me to think of another profession where people are forced to have someone who’s never done their job tell them how to do their job. I mean, just imagine doctors going to a conference to get surgical instruction from a nonsurgeon. Or Mark McGwire being forced to take hitting instruction from George Will.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that I am the Mark McGwire of teachers, but I like to think I am at least a valuable everyday player with a pretty high batting average and solid defensive skills, not the kind of guy who makes the cover of Sports Illustrated very much, but the kind of guy who plays every day and is not a liability in the field or behind the plate. And this unctuous, car-salesmany guy is telling me how to do my job. I used to think the old people at Northton were cranky freaks for hating our department head there just because she had never been a high school English teacher (though at least, unlike this guy, she had been some kind of teacher), but now, after eight years, I get it. It sucks.
Anyway, the unctuous car salesman gives us all these books of photocopies of the same stuff that’s on his PowerPoint slides. On the first day, I leave my book on my desk, because my desk is in the meeting room. The next day it’s gone.
So I’m sitting there with no book giving off sullen vibes (this has as much to do with the fact that Kirsten is in the hospital getting tests to see if her cancer has come back as it does with the fact that I am about to have five hours of my precious life wasted in this room), and the presenter comes over and says, “Brendan, do you have a book?”
What, do I work for him now?
“No, I left it on my desk and it was taken.”
He comes back about thirty seconds later—it’s now about a minute before we’re supposed to start—with a book in his hand, and he says, “This one’s mine, but you can go make a photocopy.”
Now, this plan is predicated on the whole belief that it’s important for us to have these books, which we did not use yesterday, and whose entire contents will be displayed on the screen for us in the five long hours we have ahead of us.
“Well, by the time I did sixty double-sided pages, I’d be really late—I’m just gonna look on with Lisa.”
He leaves and comes back about ten seconds later with a smug look on his face and oozes, “Brian wants to see you.” He just went and ratted me out to my boss! Unbelievable. Well, it’s okay, I mean Brian has been a principal for a long time; he knows what’s really important here, right?
I go over to see Brian, who is helping himself to a donut and talking to somebody else. When he sees me approaching, he stops his conversation and says, “Mr. Halpin, you need to have your book. Go photocopy that book right now.”
This is the first thing beyond hello that the man has said to me in the week I’ve been working for him.
So I go up and make my photocopies and come in late in front of everybody and hand the book to the asshole who ratted me out, and I sit there for five hours and dutifully turn the pages in time with the PowerPoint slides and never need the book for anything.
Curriculum may or may not get done, the ninth grade may or may not be welcomed to the school, schedules may or may not be ready, but by God, I have my book, and that’s what’s really important.
53
Things pretty much continue in this vein. I spend my morning commute on the first few days composing my resignation letter. Really. I know it needs to be a doozy, because our new president is such a skillful self-promoter that when we all leave at the end of this year (as I am increasingly sure a large number of us will), I am sure he will be able to paint it as a tremendous success on his part, because he managed to get rid of all of us who are dead weight, who are not with the program, who are not committed to devoting effective effort to finding effective practice to work toward the development of all students and, um, hitting our proficiency targets.
Sometimes the teachers play a game where we try to use all the buzzwords we can in one sentence. (I got four at the end of the last paragraph.) We also laugh about whether we are allowed to talk to each other. In the first few weeks of school, we keep getting e-mails telling us who we are not allowed to talk to. Teachers are not allowed to talk to anybody except lead teachers and deans. So, for example, if I am missing a bus pass for an advisee, I am not allowed to talk to the office manager who controls the bus passes. I must talk to my dean, who will talk to the office manager (no longer the fabulous, competent, kind woman who designed the English-department bonding raft but some cranky lady Watkins brought in). And, needless to say, my student won’t get her bus pass.
I’m not sure if these policies are just supposed to humiliate us or if they actually have some purpose. In any case, we laugh bitterly about them all the time now. The office manager will come in to the teachers’ room and ask somebody a question—apparently she’s allowed to talk to us—and when she leaves the person will say, “Oh, was I allowed to talk to her?” and we all laugh, and somebody else asks if we are hitting our proficiency targets, and we all laugh. I tell my friends that if I can get through the entire year without grabbing my crotch in a meeting and saying, “I got your proficiency target right here,” it will be something of a miracle.
On the
second day of school we start getting “feedback visits.” These, we are assured, are meant to support us. Of course, they are really spot checks to ensure compliance with all the new regulations that are in place supposedly to support student learning, but actually to separate the sheep from the goats, to tell who’s on the team and who’s not.
I quickly find myself becoming a goat. On the day after the World Trade Center horror, they tell us in an early-morning meeting that we should talk with our advisories about what happened, that we should just let it all hang out and let the discussion go where the students want it to. So on September 12 I am starting my free-for-all, let-it-all-hang-out discussion (and finding that I am way more freaked out by September 11 than my students are) and I get a visit from Erik, the Dean of Yelling at Kids, who my students all hate, who indeed has been the source of probably half the suspensions that my advisory has accumulated over the last two years, mostly for what he calls in his e-mails “insubordination to administrator,” which includes at least one of my advisees calling him a “chump” to his face, which is something I only wish I had the guts to do, which is maybe why I love my advisory so much. Anyway, Erik is now nominally in charge of advisors for some reason, and he comes into my advisory here on September 12, when we had been told to have a lesson-plan-out-the-window kind of discussion (like any of us had a lesson plan in the first place), and my advisees, who had just been warming up to a conversation, clam up the way pretty much everybody does when somebody they hate is in the room. Later I get an e-mail from Erik telling me I should have had an objective on the board.
I have a class in which I plan to have a really quick, lame discussion about a summer-reading book that I think they haven’t read, and the kids end up having a fantastic discussion that goes way beyond the lame thing I had planned. So my plans are out the window. One of the deans is watching the class. She sends me an e-mail telling me that I was ungrounded and should have the Massachusetts curriculum frameworks on the board.
The Massachusetts curriculum frameworks for English is a forty-five-page document. It is not clear exactly how I am to transcribe it in the five minutes between classes. Or should I just post it all?
So evidently the new regime is all about stuff on the board. Now this particular dean who told me to put the curriculum frameworks on the board is actually somebody I like and respect because of her work as a special-ed teacher here last year. Has she gone nuts trying to interpret strange orders from above? Or am I feeling so threatened that her feedback sounds more bizarre than it actually is? Or both?
One good thing does come of this—this fractious group of teachers that I feared could never work together after last year’s diversity debacle is now, for the most part, incredibly tight-knit. We have a common enemy.
At the end of the third week, Chip sends out an e-mail thanking us for all we are doing right and saying he is going to make the deans back off for a week. It’s nice, but it falls short of the actual apology we need. Nobody yet has acknowledged that we ever knew what we were doing, that we have been horribly insulted by this hounding “support.” (Some genius went into somebody’s class on the second day of school and observed cogently that she hadn’t succeeded in building a rapport with the students yet.) Nobody has actually admitted that they made a mistake.
So we have a week of peace, and then it’s back to spot checks to make sure we are doing all our busywork to appear to be with the program, it’s back to the résumé polishing, and it’s back to the sad, angry jokes in the teachers’ room.
Brian Watkins has carefully nurtured a reputation as a genius school administrator because he has made a couple of disgraceful schools into respectably mediocre schools. I don’t know about that, but I do know he has made this into an intolerable situation, and the grim camaraderie that comes with standing on the deck of a sinking ship with people you like won’t be enough to keep me afloat next year.
54
What makes the situation especially sad is that I’m really enjoying my classes this year. I am once again teaching two sections of ninth-grade English, and my first-period class is just fantastic. It’s the kind of quick, lively, good-natured group that I have had only two or three times in the last nine years. At the beginning of class, we write for two minutes nonstop, just to kind of clear everybody’s heads for the rest of the class, and I allow the kids to share what they’ve written. In most classes, five or six kids will share, but in this class everybody shares. All fifteen of them.
This really helps the class cohere and get to know each other in a way that is rare and wonderful. So, for example, we hear all about Patrice’s meals from the night before—multicourse, mouthwatering affairs described in loving detail and always finishing with what flavor Kool-Aid was served. By November we are all joking that we are going to show up on Patrice’s doorstep on Thanksgiving. She tells us we’re not invited but acknowledges that there will probably be enough food for us.
Pete is an aspiring poet and sometimes drops a new poem on us during this time. Luke, who’s Haitian, always begins his freewrite with “Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo,” which is especially funny to me because I had a white kid about as different from Luke as two people can be back in Northton who used to do the same thing. Talia is an aspiring rapper, and she spends the first several weeks sharing really conventional gangsta-type stuff about spitting her rhyme and capping us with her nine, until the other students sort of peer-pressure her into proving she can rhyme about something other than murder. And Laxmi, who’s dating Kadeem from last year’s quiet class, keeps us posted on the ups and downs of that relationship. So, for a few months, several kids talk about how the class feels like a family, and on Mondays half the class writes about how much they missed everybody over the weekend.
It won’t last, because Pete and Luke will have a falling-out, and later, in February, three new students will join the class, changing the dynamic quite significantly, but for the most part, the class is a joy to teach.
My other section of ninth-graders is a lot more work. They are suspicious and resistant—the “transition conversation” this year is especially painful and turns into this running joke among the kids about how they are stupid, which is exactly the kind of thing this program was trying to avoid.
So if these kids are less sold on school, they are still a lot of fun to work with. They crack me up every day, and I know I am not able to be as firm with them as I should. The prime example of this comes late in the year, when they start thinking it’s really hilarious to say “shiz-nit” all the time instead of “shit,” and “biz-nitch” instead of “bitch” because, you know, then they’re not swearing, so it’s okay to say in class, right? So I manage to get them to stop with the biz-nitch, but every day when I give homework, I get, “Now that’s some shiz-nit,” or when I yell at Mario that he should actually read during the silent reading time, he gives me “That’s some shiz-nit.” One day, a kid is doing something he’s not supposed to do, and he hasn’t even started on this big project due next week, so I gently remind him to get to work, and he says, “Aw, that’s some shiz-nit,” and I reply with, “No, what’s some shiz-nit is that you have this project due next week and you haven’t even started it! That’s some shiz-nit!”
This is probably not the best tack for me to take if I want to convince them that using modified swear words in class is, well, some shiz-nit.
I am also teaching seniors for the first time since my first year at Northton, and it’s proving to be kind of a mixed bag. I’ve known these kids for years now, and about half my advisory is in my class. I have these fantasies about all the great discussions we are going to have about all the fabulous literature we are going to read.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t really play out that way. Mainly this is because most of the kids don’t read the books. Now, this is not a new problem, and it’s certainly not unique to these kids—indeed, I think it’s probably the central problem of my entire academic discipline—but none of this makes it any easier to get
stuff done. I always try to put the kids’ ideas at the center of the class activities, but I can’t really do that here because they don’t really have any ideas because they haven’t done the reading. So we have a lot of painfully slow days.
And since they are seniors, they are subject to senioritis, which means that these problems actually manage to get worse as the year goes along. But at the end of each trimester, with the closing-of-grades deadline looming, they turn into machines. They write and revise papers at an unbelievable clip, and most of them end up doing pretty well in the class, especially considering how little they’ve done for the rest of the trimester. Talking about this phenomenon with somebody, I have an epiphany—“It’s like they do nothing for eight weeks, and then there’s this two-week frenzy of activity … whoa. I guess maybe they are ready for college.” Yes, they appear to have already mastered the collegiate “party, relax, party, relax, study” calendar. I think they’ll probably do very well when they get to college.
Then there is my advisory itself. While it suffers the usual senior problems of chronic tardiness and low attendance, it becomes a real safe haven for me. I am not sure what the students get out of having me as an advisor, but I sure as hell get a lot out of having them as advisees.
The door is closed every morning so we can talk frankly, and almost all semblance of professional detachment is gone from my interactions with them. What I mean is that usually when kids are complaining about a teacher or something, I will keep my opinions to myself, even if I agree with them, which I usually do, because it just seems unprofessional to join in. And if I am having difficulties with the administration, I will usually try to keep that to myself, but here, with these kids, I find that I just can’t put on that “Mr. Halpin” face for them. We know each other too well, and I really feel like they helped see me through the worst year of my life last year. So they complain about their “college counselor”; the dean who is handling college counseling on a part-time basis while she tries to do the rest of her job is, according to them, not doing this job anywhere near as well as Trish did with last year’s seniors. (She’s also been overheard telling one of her college-search groups, “Don’t make Mommy angry,” which is just creepy.) At first I try to equivocate a little bit and say that Mommy was set up to fail, but eventually I just more or less agree and tell them that I think they’ve been screwed over by the school. Those who have another English teacher complain that their English class is boring (those who have me probably think the same thing but are kind enough to keep it to themselves), and I allow as how, yeah, the one I sat in on was pretty boring, but that’s no excuse for you to be asleep, don’t you think I have to sit through some boring meetings, and you don’t see me falling asleep, I’d be fired in a minute if I did.
Losing My Faculties Page 20