The New Year Brings New Choices

I know that a lot of people do the traditional New Years resolution thing. I really prefer to tackle things when they come up. If I need to resolve to do something, I make the resolution at the moment, be it January or May. At the same time, New Years seems as good a time as any to consider the opportunities one has and ponder, a bit, the path ahead.

So yes, it’s cliché, but I reregistered on-line with Weight Watchers. That wasn’t so much a New Years resolution as the fact that holiday feasting meant that I needed to tackle this now, as 10 pounds seem to have presented themselves to be dealt with. I sure as hell never intend to have to tackle 40 again!

I also may have some big career decisions to make. Both my principal and the department chair of another school I’ve been investigating have asked that I give them until the first of the year before I make any decisions. Since they both said this back in October or so, it was easy to say, “Sure,” and forget about it.

Only now it is the first of the year. So here are the issues, in a nutshell, along with why they may not be issues at all:

My Present Employment-
I left for a two-year leave in 2001, burned out, frustrated, and still dealing with PTSD. I had been working in a program for at-risk kids that had been highly successful for about 10 years using a real “tough love” approach. Well, we had an assistant principal who freaked out when a kid ended up irreparably screwing up his grade well before the end of the semester. She insisted that we give kids nearly infinite new chances to pull themselves out of the hole. Nothing could be worse for this kind of kid. At-risk kids are magical thinkers. They believe that things will miraculously take care of themselves. They need to hit the wall early and hard if they’re going to turn their lives around. Trust me, we were never going to save this kid, but he would have made an example to the rest. Every year, we cut two or three loose, and the rest got their poop in a group pretty fast. Anyway, the policy changes this woman insisted upon (she was new to the school and knew NOTHING about the program) completely undermined what we doing and the whole thing fell apart. This was a huge part of why I left.

I was frustrated with education, in general. I hated being told that my job was to prep kids for a test. It made me sick to cut real curriculum—novels, essays, etc.—for workbooks designed to help kids psych out the state exam. I hated the zero tolerance policies that pretty much meant that we had to discourage kids from any sort of personal writing for fear that they might write something violent. Trust me, kids who read Stephen King and watch horror movies, as teens have long been wont to do, write violent things sometimes. Of course, since the shootings, any sort of “questionable writing” meant that mental health workers were called in en masse and the school started sweating about lawsuits. All this simply aggravated the PTSD, since it meant that the shootings were the undercurrent of everything we did.

I have been back for a year-and-a-half now. There had been big changes in my once very unified department. I saw a lot of one-upsmanship; “I’m more rigorous than you. The kids only like you because you’re easy.” The test had become the be-all-and-end-all, the major deciding factor in creating curriculum. The mark of honor was to be hated by one’s students. There were teachers who were still very kid-oriented, but they felt abused and unwelcome. Almost all real-world, critical-thinking assignments, like fact-opinion essays, had been cut because “the kids couldn’t write them” and “it’s not the English department’s job to teach current events.” Excuse me? It’s ALL our jobs to teach real-world, critical thinking!

Re-enter Paula. A number of colleagues approached me with, “Oh thank God you’re back. You’ll speak out. You’ll stand up to the bullying.” So I did. This culminated in my entry a while back, when my department chair suggested that, if I couldn’t feel good about teaching to the test, perhaps I was in the wrong profession. I decided that I was done at this particular school.

My Option-
It’s very possible that a new position is opening up at my son’s school. Right now, I’m coaching debate there after school. Imagine my delight when I started to explain some rudimentary concepts in Lincoln-Douglas debate and discovered that the social studies department had already taught the freshmen about the social contract, and they already knew who John Locke was. They don’t teach this at my school, although I think it’s critical information. Hey, it’s only the foundation of our whole country.

I had a long talk with the department chair. They are very kid-focused. Yes, they pander to the test some, that’s the political reality now, but no workbooks, and they still assign current issue essays. It would mean that I could teach the debate class, which I selfishly admit I’d like to do because I want my son to have a competitive coach and be in a competitive program, and if I don’t go there, my current assistant will get the class. He’s a swell guy who knows his philosophy, but he’s not fast or aggressive. I’m not a bitchy debater myself, and I don’t tolerate abusiveness in my debaters, but I do teach kids to corner people in cross-examination politely, quickly, and unyieldingly. I don’t really have time to do this effectively in our twice-a-week-after-school program. I need a class.

The Monkey Wrenches-
The teacher who was supposed to retire from my son’s school may not retire this year. That would render all of this moot for another year.

My colleagues in my department have been addressing their treatment of one another and have been really trying to be more respectful of each other, or at least to be more discrete about talking behind people’s backs. They have recently decided to take a hard look at the curriculum, addressing our current obsession with writing about literature and nothing but literature—tossing in more real-world writing and creative writing. We’ve agreed that the workbook thing needs to be revisited. These are changes I’ve been bitching about for a year-and-a-half. Do I leave now that we’re getting somewhere?

My principal has flat-out asked me to please stay and has offered to recreate an at-risk class with full administrative support of whatever I need to do to save these kids. (The dimwitted assistant principal who destroyed the program is gone, now.) Here, he has struck me through the heart. I am passionate about at-risk kids. I love them. It breaks my heart into a million pieces as I watch them slip through the cracks of my traditional English classes, which are simply not designed for them. All I can see is a disgraceful waste of human potential. Let me teach them with challenging books that I know they’ll love (like The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay) and writing assignments that are clearly relevant to their futures. Allow me to give them the boundaries they need. Permit me to turn their lives around, and I am in heaven. (Even when I read their first writing samples in the fall and must fight the urge to weep at all the work ahead of me.)

Okay, well, this has rambled on quite long enough. Part of me hopes that the teacher who is thinking of retiring stays another year so that I don’t have to choose. Part of me would like to be purely selfish and go to the new school, which is much closer to my home and allows me to more effectively coach my kid (so the WRONG reason to make this decision, I know). What is that old Chinese curse? “May you live in interesting times”?