The Reeds have just returned from a week in Chicago.  Some consider a road trip across the heartland (Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois) dull, but I have to say that I enjoyed it.  Naturally, there’s good family time, all trapped together in a Mazda 5, but there is more retreat than there was when my brother, step-sibs, and I were kids traveling together.  Individual iPod bubbles can now be retreated into.

There was time to wonder together:  In Colorado, it is almost impossible to eat a sandwich fast enough to keep the bread from drying out before you finish it.  In Chicago, bread left out gets soggy.  Somewhere in Nebraska or Iowa, is there a place where you can leave the bread out and nothing happens to it?  If you hit a lightning bug with your car, does it keep glowing?  Alas, we learned the answer to that one.  Yes.

We have no lightning bugs in Colorado.  The sight of them flickering in the dark fields as we drove through Iowa at dusk was magical.  We all felt so sad about the one that slowly faded on the windshield.

When we drove to Chicago from Denver, we passed field after field of glossy, dark green corn.  Sadly, we also drove past stagnant ponds and drowned plants.  On the way back, many of the stalks were tipped in gold, having achieved their gilt edges sometime in the week we were away.

Chicago was great fun.  We went to the Shedd Aquarium, the Art Institute, the Museum of Science and Industry (my one complaint—they charge extra for every really cool exhibit; they aren’t included in the price of admission), the Field Museum, and took an architectural boat tour.  We also went to the top of the Sears Tower, shopped on the Magnificent Mile, and ate great pizza.

As much fun as it was, it’s good to be home.  

On an unrelated note, if you have not yet seen Dark Night, you MUST.  God help the actor who must follow in Heath Ledger’s shoes.  Freaking amazing!

I have to warn you: if you thought my other entries were long, you ain't seen nothing yet.  My husband pointed out that I had short-changed some of the memoir, and that is largely because I was trying to finish it. I am working on other projects, and that one got out of control.  If I weren't so busy, I'd edit this and make it fit the memoir format, but what can I say?

What follows is a speech I have given to a number of schools about bullying (since people always ask me to talk about that).  I delivered this one in Canada, hence the "grade 10" instead of tenth grade.  It's 11 pages double spaced Times New Roman, so feel free to skip it if that sounds a bit long.

Calgary II

A few years ago, it seemed like there was an awful lot in the news about a school called “Columbine.” You’ve probably heard of it.  Apparently at this particular school, jocks bullied kids, shoving them into lockers and throwing food at them in the cafeteria, and teachers and administrators just stood there and did nothing.  What’s worse, they had this bully named Eric Harris who, along with his best friend Dylan Klebold, were bullied by the jock bullies.  These two kids threatened other children in the halls, built pipe bombs, and were members of a terrorist group known as “the Trenchcoat Mafia.”  Eric Harris even went so far as to write death threats toward other students on an Internet site, and although teachers and administrators knew about all of this, again, they did nothing.  They just ignored it.  I mean, how stupid can you be?  They had all these clearly dangerous kids and all these warning signs, and yet they still walked into that building every day, risking their very lives.  What happened next is a little confusing.  The way some people tell it, Eric and Dylan were pushed to the breaking point by the jocks and they came in with guns, targeting their tormentors.  Others say that, because the people around them refused to acknowledge that these two boys were clearly evil, innocent children were murdered.  Either way, the whole situation was appalling, and the more I read, the more I thanked God every day that I didn’t work at that school. 

Is that a little confusing?  You came here today expecting to hear a speech from a teacher from Columbine, didn’t you?  Right after school let out for the summer in 1999, I went to the National Speech and Debate Tournament in Arizona.  While I was there, something strange kept happening.  Some coach from somewhere would strike up a casual conversation with me, glance at my nametag that included my school, stop mid-sentence and give me that “Oh my God, you’re one of them!” look.  Now you would think I’d have figured this out by then, but each time it happened it was like a knife in the heart, and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m one of them!”

“One of them.”  “They” were those people in Jonesboro, West Paducah, Springfield, all of those other places where something was terribly wrong and something terrible happened.  More painful still, I knew that, when they saw the name of my school, they thought I was one of those people who had allowed bullies to take over our halls and terrorize our students.  I knew that, when they looked at me, they saw someone who taught at a school that wasn’t as good as theirs.  I knew that because that’s how I felt before I became “one of them.”  Before I learned that you don’t get special protection because you teach in a school full of nice kids from good homes, a school with a caring staff.  The fact is that the shooting that occurred at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 happened at a school where most of the students and teachers were very happy and felt very safe.

So today, I’m not going to tell you about the Columbine you’ve all heard about in the news.  I’m going to tell you about the Columbine where I worked both as a dean of students and a teacher for fifteen years, although I am on a leave of absence right now.  It was a typical suburban high school, in some ways like yours, in some ways not.  Our students were very homogeneous, mostly middle class and mostly white.  The kids shared so much in terms of common culture that they themselves would have told you that they felt the school was very much unified.  They participated in sports, art, drama, competitive public speaking (an activity I sponsored for thirteen of my fifteen years there), and a wide variety of other programs.  As a staff, we loved our students, and for the most part, they seemed to feel pretty good about us.  I worked for an outstanding principal who was always in touch with students and who cared about them very deeply.  I used to jokingly tell people that I worked at Utopia Senior High, but at some levels, I wasn’t really joking.  I couldn’t imagine working at a finer school.  I deeply loved my students and respected my colleagues.  I would imagine that many of you and your teacher feel the same way about your school.

It was the last thing any of us expected, but on April 20th, 1999, two of our students planted two propane bombs in our cafeteria with the intention of murdering about 500 of their classmates and teachers, along with whatever support staff had the misfortune of being in that part of the building.  When the bombs failed to detonate, the two boys shot more than thirty people, killing 12 students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves.  Among those 12 students were Dan Mauser and Rachel Scott, both members of my speech team, and Isaiah Shoels to whom I had taught English his entire eleventh grade year.  There are a number of similarities between what happened at my school and the stories that were reported in the news.  The number of victims is the same, as were the names of the two boys who committed this terrible act.  But for us, there was no simple, clear-cut scenario of bullying and revenge.

It is true that, in the two years prior to the shootings, we had a problem with a group of bullies who were involved in athletics.  They were a relatively small group, certainly not all or even most of the athletes at our school.  Unfortunately, they did sometimes cast a shadow that fell across their athletic peers.  Unlike the media’s Columbine, our staff and administration did not stand by and do nothing.  The leader of the group was suspended on a number of occasions.  But like most bullies, he had come by it honestly, modeling himself after his father.  When this bully got into trouble, the father used every form of intimidation he could think of to bail the boy out, from yelling and swearing to hiring aggressive lawyers.  In spite of this, the school’s administration did everything the law allows to curb this young man’s behavior, and he certainly learned his lesson: Never bully other kids- in front of school faculty.  Sound like a familiar lesson?

One of this group’s favorite targets was a very small group of bright, and in some ways unconventional, teens who were sometimes referred to as the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” so named because of the black, Western, duster-style coats worn by some of them.  I mentioned earlier that, unlike the media’s “Columbine” that was full of cliques, most of the students where I taught felt very much a part of their school.  But because of that, there were not many alternatives for the kids that didn’t fit in with the larger crowd.  The “Trenchcoat Mafia” was one of the few alternative groups.  They were not terrorists; they were merely different.  On the fringe of this group, though not really a part of them, were Eric and Dylan. 

Now Eric wasn’t known to be the most personable kid.  Most students found him to be pretty hostile, and Dylan, though quiet and reserved, was 6 foot 4, and not too easily intimidated.  Nonetheless, they had had more than their share of run-ins with the problem athletes I just told you about.  All of this led to a build up of deep anger between the two groups.  I don’t know about the kids at the “Columbine” in the news, but at our school, they were pretty careful about keeping the worst of it off school grounds.

In 1998, the leader of the “jock group” graduated, but Eric and Dylan continued to feed on their hatred and anger, and the remaining problem jocks continued to antagonize them.  Still, nothing happened between them in front of school faculty, and although other students knew there were conflicts, they chose not to tell us. 

I’m going to take a quick break from my story.  Pretend for a second that you don’t know where all this is leading.  Pretend I’m not up here talking about Columbine High School in 1999.  Could this much of the story have happened right here, at your school?  And being completely honest, how many of you would have gone to a teacher or administrator and said, “Hey, so-and-so threw ketchup on Eric and Dylan at McDonalds last night,” or “such-and-such threw a bottle at Eric from his van window in the park yesterday”?  How likely is it that a student here would report incidents like these?  Not very likely?  Columbine was no different.

Back to the story.  Both Eric and Dylan had written some very violent papers in class, and the teacher called both of their parents.  She was heavily criticized for “ignoring” an “obvious warning sign,” but I can’t imagine what else she would have done.  Stephen King writes some pretty violent stuff and nobody calls his parents.  How many of you read horror novels or go to horror movies?  How many of you have even written poetry or short stories with themes of horror or death?  What should your teachers do about that?  Should all of you be immediately expelled as threats to your fellow students?  Of course, not.  None of our staff was informed of Eric’s now famous, hateful web site or hit list, although a few students knew about them.  No one in our building had any reason to believe that these boys were mass murderers in the making. 

So here’s where things get tricky.  Often, I am asked to speak in conjunction with some program or another that adults want to implement in order to “bully-proof” their schools.  First, I have to tell you straight up, I don’t believe that bullying was the cause of the shootings at Columbine on April 20th.  I think we have to be careful when we focus on that as the cause.  Unfortunately, there are bullies in the world, and not just in schools.  And when we say that these bullies cause children to go to school and shoot people, we say that shooting people is a possible way of handling bullies- maybe not an acceptable way or a desirable way, but it is a possibility.  At our school, Eric and Dylan caused the shootings.  The notion that they had targeted their tormentors is entirely inaccurate.  If you’re looking for tough jocks, you don’t look in the library.  Rachel Scott was well known for reaching out to misfits and had been friends with Dylan Klebold.  Dan Mauser was very shy and quiet.  Eric and Dylan referred to him as “the nerd with the glasses” before they shot and killed him.  Two of their victims were special ed students with substantial disabilities.  The bullets didn’t so much as graze any of the boys who had harassed Eric and Dylan.  Also, remember that their original plan was to blow up the entire south wing of the building.  Bombs know no targets. 

Still, it is fair to say that the treatment that they received at the hands of a few of their fellow students was a contributing factor.  In the end, too many innocent people have suffered for a relatively small situation that blew rapidly out of control.

So adults have looked at our situation and many have decided to create programs designed to stop kids from bullying each other.  Right.  Maybe when we figure how to get a grip on bullying in the Middle East we’ll have the magic answer for all of you.  In the mean time, most so-called bully-proofing programs and policies leave out the most important piece of the solution- you.  Columbine, along with many other schools in the United States, now has a “zero tolerance policy” for bullying.  This means that the administration immediately suspends anyone who engages in any form of behavior that could possibly be construed as intimidating.  Nine times out of ten, the students, even the supposed “victims” of the intimidating behavior, feel the school is overreacting.  The kids have come to refer to this policy as the “I’m offended, you’re suspended” policy, and they resent the heck out of it.  So what are adults supposed to do?  On the one hand, students want us to intervene in cases of bullying, but they won’t tell us when they’re being bullied, and they don’t want us to overreact to normal conflict or friendly teasing. 

This is just one teacher’s observation, but it seems to me that true bullies are masters at pushing the envelope.  When they decide to pick on someone in class, they go just slightly over the edge of “normal conflict or friendly teasing.”  Not far enough to be really obvious to a teacher who is supervising thirty or more students, but far enough so that the victim and everyone in the immediate area knows exactly what’s going on.  Sound familiar?  The really bad stuff happens after school or in crowded hallways, where it is less noticeable to adults.

I mentioned earlier, when the school takes disciplinary action, bullies simply become more careful about where they do their bullying.  Let’s face it, kids.  Teachers and administrators would love to have a school without bullies, and if getting rid of them were in their power alone, they would have done it by now.   If you’re waiting for adults to fix this problem, you’re going to be waiting a very long time.  If I were still teaching and getting a regular pay check, I’d bet a month’s salary that all of you who are sitting in front of me today know as well or far better than the adults in here just who your school’s problem bullies are.  “Zero tolerance” only works when everyone at school is on the same page; when adults and students all agree that ruthless intimidation is completely unacceptable and that no one should have to stand up to a bully alone.  Even the most hard-core bully will back down when faced by the overwhelming disapproval of his or her peers.  Are you getting the picture? 

I know that what I’m asking you to do isn’t easy.  I know that when you stand up to a bully on someone else’s behalf, you risk becoming a target.  I also know that it seems like some kids just beg to be bullied.  You all know the kind of kid I’m talking about, the one who seems to actually try to be as geeky and obnoxious as humanly possible.  But every one of you plays a vital part in any act of bullying.  When a bully pushes the limits in class, and you know what’s happening but say nothing, you allow bullying in your school.  When you laugh at some cruel joke played on that geeky kid nobody likes, you encourage bullying at your school.  No policy, no form of discipline is as powerful as your response.  Together, you can choose to create a school where bullies feel out of place and unwelcome.

OK, you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t change the fact that, in her heart, she’s a teacher.  As I teacher, I never lecture this long without putting some poor, unfortunate soul on the spot.  Who can tell me what the term “grassroots” means in the political sense, like a “grassroots movement”? (Get an answer from a kid here, several if needed).  That’s right- it’s something that occurs from the ground up, the way that grass grows and spreads to cover a wide area.  You see, I came here today to do more than tell you a tragic story about the school where I worked.  I came here to plant a few seeds.  But I’m going back home on Saturday, so whether or not those seeds grow is up to you.  You can take on the responsibility of watering and nurturing them, or you can let them blow away in the wind. 

If they are to grow, then there is something you need to do today and every day for the next few weeks.  When you sit with your friends at lunch, when you hang out together after school, you need to make a pact.  You need to agree that you will stop laughing, stop watching in silence while kids in your school are humiliated or intimidated by your peers.  You also need to make a commitment to each other.  You need to say to each other, “I’ve got your back.”  When one person is brave enough to stand up to one of the school’s scariest people, they deserve to have the support of their peers.  A bully can target one, two, even three people who have the nerve to get in the way, but there is very little they can do when twenty people in a classroom or even ten people in a cafeteria make it clear that they won’t tolerate cruelty and intimidation.  Bullies can avoid punishment at school, but there is nothing they can do to prevent getting the cold shoulder from their peers because of how they treat people outside of school.  The most effective consequences for intimidation are in your hands.

Do you think I’m being unrealistic?  Am I another clueless adult?  I’m going to spare you all the gory details of April 20th.  I refuse to glorify what Eric and Dylan did or to demean the precious lives of those murdered by focusing too much on their deaths.  I’m going to skip to April 21st, and nearly 2000 people so damned grateful for every single person who walked out of that building alive that they no longer cared who was cool and who wasn’t, or who had called whom what name, or who had blown it on the field and lost last week’s game.  I saw kids who hated each other’s guts two days before walk into each other’s arms and sob.  I saw that unity stay solidly in place in the school year to follow.  In 1999 and 2000, Columbine was a very bad place to be a bully.

I’ll tell you another little story to illustrate.  The year before the shootings, I taught a boy named Jake who was, hands down, the meanest child I have ever met in my life- that includes every kid I knew growing up and every one of the kids I’ve taught in the last fifteen years.  Believe it or not, this child wasn’t the lead jock, the twelfth grader that tormented Eric and Dylan.  Jake was meaner than that kid, but at that point, he was only in grade ten.  By the year after the shootings, Jake was in grade twelve, and he fully expected to ascend to the throne of Scariest Kid at Columbine.  As I said before, this wasn’t a good year to make that your personal goal.  One his favorite targets, a shy boy, shared a social studies class with him.  Unfortunately for Jake, so did one of my best debaters- Susan.  Typically, Jake would quietly push the envelope, make little, verbal digs at this one boy, but never doing anything that would actually get him in trouble with the teacher.  Little did Jake know, the teacher was the least of his problems.  It didn’t take Susan long to figure out what was going on, and one day, she stood up and told Jake that trying to make people afraid of him was a pathetic way to make friends.  Jake tried to turn on her, but Susan’s a debater, and in no time flat, she had shredded him in front of thirty people.  Each time that Jake tried to intimidate her with some crude comment, he turned to his audience, expecting support, only so see that support going to Susan.  In the end, when Susan had finished with him, she was the one who received the applause of her classmates, and Jake’s behavior in every class changed for the better.  He even stopped harassing the two freshman debaters in his gym class, although neither of those two boys had the nerve to stand up to him.

Back when he was a tenth grader, I had pulled Jake out of class to reprimand him and had spoken with his mother repeatedly.  Other teachers had done the same.  The school’s administration had even suspended him once.  Years of formal discipline had not had the effect that one good tongue lashing from a peer had.

Of course, Susan had really strong motivation.  One of her best friends, Rachel Scott, had always been a role model and strong speaker on behalf of the need for kindness and compassion.  Rachel envisioned a world were a small group of people would start a chain reaction of kindness that would spread without limits.  On April 17, 1999, Rachel came over to Susan’s house so that they could get ready for the prom.  Susan went with her boyfriend Craig, and Rachel went with Chris’ best friend, Nate.  Susan’s mom videotaped the pre-prom preparations, including the moment when Rachel, struggling to pin her date’s boutonniere on his lapel, laughed and said, “I’m never going to another dance.”  On April 24th, six days later, I stood next to Susan as she looked into a white casket covered in notes written by Rachel’s friends and saw that Rachel was still wearing the earrings that she had lent her for prom.

So Susan and others who lived through April 20 were extraordinarily motivated to keep the unity and compassion that came out of the shootings through the next year.  But we lost fifteen people that day.  To have the students of only one school reap that lesson of unity is hardly worth it.  How wonderful it could be if you could learn what Susan and her classmates learned without paying their price.  You see, most of the time, when kids treat each other cruelly at school, it doesn’t result in a school shooting, and as I said before, I don’t think that bullies can be blamed for what Eric and Dylan chose to do.  But bullying and intimidation do contribute to suicide, depression, substance abuse, and dropping out.  What you say to a classmate today, or what you allow others to say, can impact people for the rest of their lives.  Here at school, you teach each other as much as the faculty teaches you, maybe more.  What do you want to be responsible for teaching, that the world is a cold, cruel place and its everyone for him or herself, or that really, taking care of each other isn’t so tough if you all decide that it’s important?
Preventing violence in your school starts at the grassroots, but it’s OK to ask adults for a little help with the lawn care.  These days, no one at Columbine thinks twice about one kid turning in another for making threats.  That’s something that’s changing in schools all across the world.  Kids have always told each other things that they would never tell their teachers or parents, but sometimes, that information has to be shared.  I wonder what might have been different if the students who knew about Eric’s website had told the school.  It certainly would have cast a different light on the violence of his and Dylan’s creative writing.  And what if the law-enforcement officials who dealt with Eric and Dylan when they broke into someone’s van had known what many of the boys’ friends knew, that they were building pipe bombs, too.  What if Dylan’s prom date hadn’t bought guns for them, but instead had told an adult that they had asked her to?  It’s all the what ifs that make healing so hard.

I know that what I’m asking you to do, to look at Columbine and see that it isn’t so different from your own school, is painful; it threatens your sense of safety.  I realize that, in this violent world, it is overwhelming to think about trying to create peace and unity in your school, but believe it or not, there is something much, much harder to do:

(Pull out Rachel’s letter.)  If you were to go digging in your locker or your backpack, how many of you might find a note from a friend on a piece of paper like this?  What might it say?  Would it complain about school or parents?  Reveal the identity of a secret crush?  Would it contain plans for the future, maybe a party or a movie over the weekend?  A student gave me this note at the National Qualifying Speech Meet.  She said that she really wanted to go out for coffee with me, but that it just wouldn’t feel right until she graduated, so she wrote me the note.

Close your eyes for a moment.  Humor me on this one, no peeking.  Picture a friend who might pass a note to you in the hall.  Bring that picture into focus.  Hear the musical sound of their laughter, see their smile, try to remember everything about them.  Focus that image so sharply that you can almost reach out and touch the person.  Do you have it?  The girl who wrote me this note used to have long hair, but she let a friend shave the back of her head to play the part of an alternative-type kid in the school play.  When she smiled, she tilted her head to one side.  She had this really sarcastic sense of humor and this funny little smirk that was really cute, and she had a secret crush on a boy named Andy.  He was her mentor on the speech team and had helped her with her competition.  (Read letter)

If you think that working together with your friends and your teachers to prevent violence here is hard, imagine that all you have left of your friend is a picture in your mind, and a note in your backpack.  Ten days after this note was written, that was all I had left of Rachel Scott.  I wish I had even that much of my other students, Dan Mauser and Isaiah Shoels.  I do still have their pictures in my mind, and I think of them many, many times, every single day.

School shootings are rare, and it is statistically unlikely that any of you here will suddenly find yourselves “one of them.”  But I of all people know that statistics have no soul.  Like my brothers and sisters at schools such as Santiago High School in California and the Gutenberg School in Erfurt Germany, I know what it’s like to stare blankly at a news camera and say, “But this kind of thing just doesn’t happen here.”  No offense, but I don’t want you in our club.  Maybe I’m asking you to dodge a bullet that isn’t even there.  Maybe this kind of thing really doesn’t happen here.  So what?  Bullying and intimidation happen at every school, but they don’t have to.  April 20th and the years that have followed have taught me a lot of things.  One is that no school is immune to violence, and the other is that we can choose to do something about it.  I paid for those lessons with the lives of children I loved.  I paid for them with my life’s passion, teaching.  I don’t charge a speaker’s fee when I come to schools like yours.  I humbly offer to you for free that which I bankrupted my soul to learn.  What you do with it is entirely up to you.
 

 

Well, I thank you all kindly, those of you who have managed to hang in there through this very long series.  Actually, I posted many of these ahead of time, and have been out of town for a bit.  Once I get back and catch up to the rest of my life, I'll be back with the more customary blog entries.  It was good to finish the project, although most of it was not as polished as my usual "book work."  Again, I thank you for your indulgence and all the lovely comments.

The Next Peak

So here I am, on page 97 (Times New Roman, 12 point font, double-spaced).  Perhaps this is why this isn’t really a whole book.

There have been moments of sadness.  I already mentioned one.  An ACE kid who graduated in 1999 was killed in Afghanistan last fall.  He was in the navy and had also served in Iraq.  I lost a student to suicide last January.  At the funeral, his mother talked about her divorce from his father and his poor grades as possible reasons for what he’d done.  I went to school the next Monday and told my students about my own life, including divorced parents and poor grades, offering myself as an example that such challenges are surmountable.  The kids responded so warmly and seemed to genuinely appreciate the encouragement.  Several wrote lovely notes.  (I have many notes from years of teaching.  They are precious reminders that what I do matters.)

There have been wonderful moments, as well.  Three students last year were working on novels, and two shared their beginnings with me, giving us all a chance to talk together as “writers.”  Next year, I will be teaching a new class, Contemporary Literature/Film Studies.  It’s one of the senior-level English classes ACE kids go into.  (At the senior-level, ACE is a math class, not English.)  I’m looking forward to the kids who will continue with me there, and they’re excited, too, so they must be feeling pretty good about what they got in ACE last year.

I still get frustrated.  Our county’s central administration is still very test-score focused.  I am astounded at the amount of busy-work that has been added to teachers’ duties.  We are forced to read articles that wouldn’t have been particularly useful when I was a brand-new teacher, much less now that I have a couple of decades under my belt.  To prove that we have indeed wasted our very valuable time on them, we answer questions about the reading, most of which are at the lowest level of thinking.  They’re the questions I ask on quizzes, when I’m just trying to confirm that kids have read, not the deeper questions I ask on tests, when I’m trying to determine what they’ve learned.  We make up tasks that have nothing to do with our real jobs.  We attend meetings and watch PowerPoints produced by central administration that have typos, spelling mistakes, and very little valuable information.  This is how “accountability” has been translated.  It’s all about producing “stuff,” because a paper trail is much easier to quantify than actual improvement in teaching. 

Our obsession with quantifying as a means of making schools accountable has reduced children to test scores.  At this point, I spend around three weeks a year giving tests that are in no way connected to my classroom.  I either cannot or do not access the scores as the information is useless.  I give a writing assignment within the first two weeks of school.  From it, I am able to assess each student’s ability to write, especially in relation the skills I need him or her to have for my class.  I assign reading and test kids at every level of thinking.  I know where every kid stands before August is out.  Taking two days out of my class to give a test that will, at best, repeat what I already know and at worst, give me nothing at all, with the results available in September, is a waste of time.

We test again and again throughout the year.  Of course, so do I, only my tests go into greater depth, are relevant, and allow me to focus on individual kids’ needs.  The truth is, I only give the additional tests because NCLB has made school districts into giant number-gathering systems.  Nothing gets done with those numbers, but thank goodness we gave up three weeks of instruction time to gather them!

For me, there is a golden lining.  I have been teaching in my school district since 1986.  I am damned near impossible to fire.  In meetings, when we are told we must do something pointless and stupid, I can say, “Ahem.  This is pointless and stupid. I mean, I’ll do it if I have to; I’m just checking to make sure we really want to spend time on this pointless, stupid thing.” 

When I came back from my leave, I had to have my teacher evaluation.  At the beginning of the year, I was supposed to set three “measurable” goals.  Most teachers make up things like “increase my use of technology in the classroom.”  Then they add a PowerPoint lecture and call it good.  I told the new assistant principal that I only had two.  “I can jump through hoops,” I said, “so I’m willing to make ‘create more CSAP-style questions on tests’ one of my goals.  My only other one is to make the students competent writers.  Their writing is abominable.”

She said, “Have you looked at their writing scores?”

I said, “I don’t have to.  I’ve read their writing and it’s atrocious.  I want to implement some of the things I have learned as a professional writer, especially regarding effective use of peer critique.”

“Um.  Okay,” she said. 

See, there was a problem.  This is not a “measurable” goal.  No paper trail other than classroom assignments, which for reasons I cannot explain, do not count.  She didn’t have to tell me this.  I knew it from the start.  Still, it was my goal.  Their writing was God-awful.

I concluded with, “Those are the only two goals I could think of, and the writing one is going to require a lot of work on my part.  If you’d like, I can come up with some other bullshit goal…?”

Bear in mind, this woman and I have not had a one-on-one conversation before this.  She’d only been there a year, and I’d been gone.  She blinked and said, “Well, naturally, I want you to write down real goals—”

“Great!” I said.  “Two it is!”  And those were my goals for the year.

Last year, I wrote a letter to our superintendent about the morale crisis in our district, and she even met with me for two hours as a result.  Has anything changed?  No.  But it took a while for our department to work things out, and we’re getting there.  I think you start change by opening up the conversation.  Newer teachers don’t feel so free to speak the truth to power.

And when I think something is really ridiculous?  I email Frank and say, “I refuse to do this,” and Frank respects me enough to know that I would do it if I thought I could make anything remotely valuable come of it, so he says okay and lets me substitute something I think will really be helpful.  God bless, Frank.  I try to make sure I tell him when I think something is great, but let’s face it, more often than not, when I send him an email or make an appointment, I have more cards to lay down, and he always pulls up to the table with me to talk.  I worry about him.  The past ten years have taken a heavy toll.  If my recollections of April 20 and the years that followed were hard to read, imagine what his would look like?  He has shouldered a heavy burden.

I don’t work in Utopia.  We are not bulletproof.  We had a bomb threat two years ago, and because of the changes we’ve made in the evacuation process, we ended up back in the same elementary school gymnasium where I spent all those hours on April 20.  The incident sent me into a PTSD reaction that finally convinced me that “better living through chemicals” is sometimes the answer.  I keep my bottle of generic Ativan at school at all times.  I haven’t had to use it since that occasion, but it’s there just in case. 

I keep writing.  I moved from romance to women’s historical fiction, and hopefully, I’ll see another book or two in print.

My son is a senior who is thinking of becoming a teacher.  (I’m trying to talk him out of it.  It’s only tolerable if you have a ton of seniority and can buck the system.)  My daughter is 13.  The funny thing about teaching high school is that, before you have children, you can only imagine parenting teenagers.  Early childhood is a vast mystery.  At last, I am the parent I imagined being before my kids were born.

In my career, I have experienced great joy and utter despondency, but this I know: I would not trade a minute of it for all the fame and glamour that a career as an actress could possibly have to offer.  It is like caffeine without jitters.  Like adrenaline without fear.  It has been amazing.

 

The Next Peak 

My heart is with my ACE kids.

Another year of job sharing would mean that my colleague (with less seniority) would have to give up her seniority at Columbine, and quite frankly, my family needed a full-time salary from me.  Continuing the job-share was not advantageous to either of us.  I started the 2006-2007 school year teaching three sections of ninth grade and one two-hour block of ACE with a new partner.

I had hoped to coax my former partner back into the program.  He’d been teaching at a tiny (four staff members), special school for at-risk kids, but he missed being a part of a larger staff.  Then, the summer before the program started back up, he moved away without a word to anyone, and no one in Colorado has heard from him since.  I know what city he moved to, and third-hand, I’m told he divorced and remarried, but I have heard nothing from him.  It would be a lie to say I wasn’t hurt, but I can also understand the need to get away from everything that happened here.  Get a clean break.  I wish we could have talked when one of our former students was killed in Afghanistan last fall, but I imagine that was exactly the kind of thing he wanted to get away from.

My new partner is very young and moved here from California to take the job.  It took a while to get comfortable together.  My former partner and I were the same age and very similar in our political and religious beliefs.  (He even started attending my church.)  My new partner is pretty conservative, and he was so damned respectful for the longest time.  I felt every inch the “veteran” (read “elder”) teacher.  After two years together, though, we are much more comfortable and can even joke about the age difference.  He’s a great guy and a very good teacher, but I wonder how many years of ACE he has in him.  Remember how I said that most teachers were either very, very good students or very bad ones.  He fell into the former category.  I think there’s a certain advantage for an ACE teacher to really understand why someone might hate school and even feel hostile toward teachers who are doing nothing more than trying to help.  

Of course, I teach some “regular” classes, so I get some balance—kids who actually like Romeo and Juliet and The Great Gatsby.  He has ACE full time, and I think that’s harder, though to Frank’s credit, the program has had full administrative support.  The assistant principals we’ve been working with could not possibly be greater advocates for us and our students.

The kids never change.  Some just can’t give up the drugs, like the girl I had been writing to in rehab last year until I got a letter back with “no longer at this address” long before she’d completed.  Others blossom, like the boy who had gotten off to a bumpy start the first two years in high school but last year was elected president of the diversity club and pulled nearly straight A’s (except for gym—what was up with that?).

In the English department, we’ve come a long way.  We’ve basically given up chasing the test and concentrate on a solid, college-prep curriculum.  We’ve even developed a “cannon,” a list of books we all agree to teach.  So much for it being impossible for our group to agree on anything.  Is everyone thrilled with every bit of it?  No, but it does ensure some consistency.  We teach one traditional literary analysis per semester.  Otherwise, we teach a variety of writing.  I wish I could say this was due to my amazing influence, but it’s really been a combination of district direction and process of evolution.  Nonetheless, I think we’ve done some very good things.

The forensics team is now coached by one of my previous students from my first year at Columbine—a contemporary of Marti’s (who is now coaching the powerhouse team in the state).  In fact, two of my current department colleagues were members of that team.  The social studies department has just hired a member of my 1999 team.  

I actually started another speech team at my son’s school his freshman year.  At the time, another member of the staff asked to assistant coach, so we worked together.  The next year, the school agreed to offer a class, and since I was at Columbine, not my son’s school, the other person taught the classes and became head coach.  He is the only other teacher I have ever encountered that I could not work with.  Our styles are just too dramatically different.  Despite over a decade in the field, he’s still stuck believing that kids have to like him to learn from him, and he is still convinced that kids cannot like a teacher who demands a great deal from them.  Never mind that all the kids from my son’s team who have worked with me like me, even though I ask a lot and can be very critical.  In fact, to this day, they come to my house for additional help.  He is a kind and well-meaning man, we just have very different philosophies.