The (Mis)adventures of Yo-yo Boy

One of the things the Petty Bureaucrats Who Think They Know All don't get about teaching-- among many, many, many, MANY things!-- is the emotional care and guidance teachers expend upon their students. This part of the student-teacher relationship has very little to do (in an obvious way) about test scores and yet it cannot be ignored.

One of my students is Yo-yo Boy. Yo-yo Boy's dad and mom are not in the picture, but YYB does have a cousin and her husband. YYB has some issues: he will lie absolutely to your face, he will steal anything not nailed down, he has a trillion excuses and a healthy self-pitying martyr complex for any failures on his part, he is absolutely mesmerized by the presence of female persons without having the minutest idea of how to appropriately interact with them. Worse, he is a victim of the rankest social promotion on the part of a neighboring school district that I have ever seen-- to the extent that he was (non)functionally illiterate when we first got him in our high school. Yo-yo Boy has bounced around from home to home, school to school, suspension to suspension.

It is my happy duty to teach this young fella. It is also my happy duty to impart the following wisdom, in the order in which it occurred:
1) Ms. Cornelius does NOT want to know the color of your underwear, and neither does anyone else.
2) Grabbing the derriere of a young lady you do not know does NOT enamor her of you and will indeed get you suspended.
3) The secret to passing a class is to... get this!-- do the assignments, study for tests and quizzes, and pay attention in class.
4) The preliminary secret to #3 is to bring a pencil, your assignments, and a book to class every day. Without fail.
5) Dudes do not carry purses in our neck of the woods, so having one in your possession will cause you to get jugged for stealing.
6) Do not mouth off to the people providing you with shelter or fight with their own children, or you will get thrown out of the house, even if they love you.
7) You are not a bad enough mamma- jamma to make it on the streets for even five seconds, so pay attention to #6.
8) You will get fired from your job if you do not show up on time, so yes, Ms. Cornelius counts tardies. Plus, you do not be engaging in #2 or #5 so that you then violate #8.
9) Ms. Cornelius will cross-check every single thing you tell her, so don't even bother to lie.
10) If you do not understand, ask.

Sadly, Yo-yo Boy violated #6 one too many times. I do not know if I will see him again.

Or he could turn up tomorrow.

That's just part of the teaching life in a real public school, where testing is sometimes the least measure of our worth.

Add this to the list of things that bureaucrats don't understand about teachers' lives.

So here's a situation.

A parent requested a conference with a teacher I know during conference time. This parent began yelling and gesticulating wildly during the conference, until the teacher asked the parent to leave. By the way, the teacher in question is so calm, he's practically a reincarnation of the Buddha. Parent stormed off and went to an administrator and made a bunch of wild claims about the teacher and then stormed out of the administrator's office.

So far, not all that unusual, right?

Here's where it gets interesting: the parent's kid approached the teacher a few days later, accused him of threatening the mother, and then threatened to attack the teacher. This was done IN FRONT OF WITNESSES.

Wow. Makes Race to the Top seem kind of insignificant and out-of-touch, doesn't it?

The assumption that students are all here to learn, that students are all cooperative, sane, and non-violent, is just not a part of the reality of teaching in a public school. That goes for parents, too.

And it's certainly true that the majority of students and parents do not behave this way. But this kind of family is becoming ever more common. There have been more assaults or threatened assaults on teachers of my acquaintance this year that any year that I can remember since I started teaching school back in the 1980s.

Now, luckily, the student has been suspended from school for the maximum allowed time, which is good, since it is known that the family has guns in the house. It is good to know that the administrators took this seriously.

So maybe Arne Duncan has some advice about this situation from his vast well of educational experience? If so, I'd like to hear it.

That'll be two boxes of kleenex, please.

The Big Giant Head, the name I assign to whoever it is who sets our department budget, has spread the word that we have fifty bucks apiece to spend on school supplies for the year. We can only spend it on materials ordered through This Special Catalogue.

This Special Catalogue has prices about 150-200% the prices at Office Max.

Who is getting the kickbacks in this situation? That's what I want to know. We are not allow to turn in receipts from an outside store for the school supplies we purchase-- much more cheaply-- ourselves.

Oh, and back when I worked in my first teaching job in a school formerly staffed by nuns, some thirty years ago, guess how much I was allowed to spend on school supplies?

Yep. Fifty bucks.

But those bucks went further, back then. After all, they were in doubloons, because paper money had not been invented yet.

There are no words.

That late great author Douglas Adams once said, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

My colleagues in the special education department were supposed to get me all the IEPs for my students who have one last Friday. I just got another one today, and several were emailed, dated 11:59 pm, on Friday evening.

So, nearly half of the kids in my regular classes have IEPs that allow them to turn in work late.

All their work. All the time.

Some of these kids are seventeen and eighteen years old.

Discuss. I'll be back after I wash my mouth out with soap.

If you had listened...

Dear Principal,

I bid you farewell as you leave our school. Not with fondness, unfortunately, but with a sense of sadness, frustration, and even anger at the way that our so-called "relationship" developed. Indeed I use this term with some sense that it is completely inappropriate, given that you have done everything in your power to avoid developing any sort of relationship with any of the staff but a covey of sycophants whose servile obsequiousness to your face was actually less revolting than their gleeful mockery of you behind your back.

I come not to mock, but to mourn.

Teachers make their livings partly by being heard. This is one of the great conundrums of education today, since their voices are usually the last ones to be sought out by those that influence policy. You certainly maintained this same pattern in your dealings with your staff. In your interview before your official hiring, you looked us straight in the eye and declared that you were going to "be there" for your staff and support us and set up all kinds of mechanisms to listen to us. As an aside, although it was obvious from the choices of the other finalists that you were "the annointed one," the proprieties were still observed and you were "interviewed by some select staff members." But listening is not a task that you were in any way invested in. And yes, listening can be a task. But it is a task that enables a leader to lead effectively. It is indicative of understanding that the work of any school is the work of all the people there from the maintenance staff and secretaries to the lunch ladies to the teachers and support personnel to the administrators.

It was perhaps cute (or actually a bit Stepford-wifely) that you wore a suit in our school colors even to that interview and then for the first solid year that you were with us. I didn't know they made that many kinds of suits in that color (you may not be able to lead a collie to kibble, but man, you certainly can SHOP). You wore these suits to transmit a symbolic emblem of your investment (monetarily and supposedly emotionally) in our school. But purchasing a uniform does not make you a member of a team. It is not what is on the outside that matters, to use the old cliche. A real leader's raiment is integrity, professionalism, openness, honesty, forthrightness, strength, discipline, vision, and cooperation.

The first thing you did upon ensconcing yourself in the principal's office was attempt to completely redo the daily schedule and course offerings. Now, to be fair, this may have been decreed by our well-intentioned but generally blindered superintendent and/or school board. But it would have been wiser to get your feet under you, see for yourself what things needed to be changed, and THEN moved from a position of first-hand knowledge.

If you were in any way self-reflective and honest with yourself, you would, I hope, realize that your first and greatest failure, before the lying and manipulation and supercilious contempt, was a hubristic failure to listen to people who truly were stakeholders in the school. Or, many many times, to even make an appearance in the hallways at least once a week. Sometimes, we even kept a tally to make sure we weren't imagining the H.G. Wells act.

We were there before you came. We are still here now that you are leaving. We will continue on in the task we have elected to take up-- the education of our fellow citizens and future workers-- and attempt to clean up the mess that has developed because there are no other options for those of us who truly care about this school.

Several people tried to dialogue with you in a positive way about policies and procedures and challenges facing the school. At first, these were vestigial challenges that could not have possibly been interpreted by you as implying any criticism or failures upon your administration, and yet you recoiled from listening as if your teachers were attempting to force you to watch some sort of existentialist French puppet show.

If you had listened perhaps you would have learned or been reminded of yet another crucial lesson for a leader: that those on your staff are PEOPLE who are deserving of being treated with respect and human decency. Countless examples of untruths and half-truths issued from your lips about dealings you had with your staff. You publicly humiliated people with your thoughtlessness and then had the nerve to warn THEM to maintain professionalism and decorum. YOU have driven more than one adult to tears. In front of students. Appalling.

Then there was your response in the face of crises, as I have previously talked about here. We had a few the last few years: natural disasters, tragic student illnesses, and crime waves that could happen at any school, and, if handled properly, are weathered by the school community with little long-term effect. But you didn't seem to be concerned with working with the staff to meet these challenges so much as you were concerned with aggrandizing your own sense of power and limiting the flow of information in a patent attempt to build up the mystique of that "power." Rather than be honest with the staff about situations in the school community, your favorite tactic was to call emergency meetings after school to ask staff to report "ANYTHING suspicious"-- ANYTHING-- while claiming that you could not tell that same staff the context regarding the crisis or concern. By the time staff got home from work, the local news organizations had released far more information about the incident at hand than you had shared with us. You claim that "the law" prevents you from being informative. YOU ARE WRONG, either through ignorance or flat-out dishonesty.

So much that was so wrong. Impugning the integrity of your staff. Behaving like a capricious martinet instead of a person of substance. Hatefulness and incomparable hubris. Farewell, Captain Queeg. Godspeed. Which is another way of saying that you should accelerate yourself out the door. For everyone's sake.

Parent teacher confences: appreciating the love

So we had our own parent teacher conferences, and, like with everything in life, therer was the rough and the smooth. It took a while, but I finally reminded myself that there was a whole lot more smooth than rough.

First, the smooth: how many parents popped by just to tell me that they appreciated my hard work or that their kid tells them stories I told them in class or that their kid has never actually spent so much time studying for a class and yet enjoying themselves. Four of last year's kids' parents came by to tell me that they had gotten into the college they wanted, and to thank me for the recommendation letters, and one mom hugged me tight enough to crack a rib not once but twice. That was really nice.

Now, at the end was the parent who lies about what I do and say about once a week. He demanded that I do all sorts of things to appease him, and I politely but firmly refused even while he lied to my face four times in fifteen minutes. He huffed off after that, and I did regret the fact that this was how it went down. He then told my principal that I had "bullied" him (look up the definition of bullying, and you will see that that was what he has been attempting to do to me all year, but okay, whatever. I guess I won't be on the Christmas card list.

But you know, you have to out things in perspective. Thirty really great conferences. One mediocre confence, and one pretty tense one. Overall, this is not bad; in fact, it is pretty darn good. In fact, that weekend, I was sitting in a restaurant waiting for the Hubster to meet me for dinner when the barkeep told me my drinks were on the house, and I looked around, and there were two-- TWO--of my kids' parents raising the glass to me! I mean, awkward, but also really sweet!!!

So you know, yiu take thd rough with the smooth. And you accept the free merlot, too. And be thankful.

So you think teachers are overpaid?

I sigh, and say, "Bring it."

After what we deal with all day, what's a few more brickbats thrown our way?

So let's review:

Indiana's legislature wants to take away collective bargaining rights for teachers.

So does, as we all know, Wisconsin's legislature and governor.

Tennessee's governor wants to lengthen the amount of time teachers wait to get "tenure," which apparently no one understands as being operationally null as a concept. Tenure does NOT guarantee a permanent job-- it just guarantees that due process must be followed when dealing with teacher retention and evaluation.

Idaho gutted both tenure and collective bargaining.

And there are dozens more stories being propagated of lazy teachers being promised a job for life, getting a generous pension that amounts to robbery from the rest of society, and so on.

Here's the life of teachers from the inside:

In any class that we teach, we are watching about three students for signs of emotional distress based on previous history. Then there are incidental crises among the other students that occur based on fighting with parents, break-ups of relationships, health scares and injuries, potential eating disorders, parental or personal alcoholism, divorces, pregnancies, and suicidal tendencies and/or harming oneself. Thanks to a lawsuit from, once again, Wisconsin (is it something in the water there?) emails may be considered public records and so, to maintain confidentiality, if I have a serious concern, I must walk to the counseling or administrative office during my plan time to discuss those concerns face-to-face. If I have a student in immediate distress, I escort them to the counselor or principal personally, hopefully during passing time. We scrutinize for lines of scabs on arms, bloodshot eyes, poor hygiene, lethargy or mania.

We remind students to make up missing assignments and or tests repeatedly and individually since apparently many students think that teachers declare a moratorium on assignments or assessments in the wake of absences. Students will ask for exhaustive lists of missing work even though assignments and tests are posted on classroom bulletin boards and websites as well as online on the internet-based grade-book program our school operates.

As we move through the hallways, we monitor students for signs of distress (last week as I was on the way to the restroom, I helped a young man to the counselor who was wedged into a weird little blindspot in an empty hallway in tears). We stop kids from harassing each other or roughhousing, which endangers themselves as well as others. We watch for those students or adults in the building without visible ID and direct them to a check-in spot. We greet kids with a smile (in case that's the only smile they get that day) and complement kids on their wardrobes. Over there is the kid who was shot and wounded outside his aunt's house and is using a crutch until the wound heals. There is a kid trying to sneak into the bathroom to hide in a stall until passing time is over so she can wander the building and skip her English class (in which she currently has a 7% average and twenty-two absences this semester alone). We round a corner and loom into view of kids squaring off to probably fight, and eyeball them until they either drop it and go away or continue to shout at each other in the hopes that we will intervene and help them save face without actually appearing to back down themselves. We congratulate that kid who has a bunch of enormous birthday balloons and we give the big high-five to the kid who just got into the college she wanted. We ask kids where they are going and why they aren't in class. And meanwhile, we don't get to the restroom. We sniff for the wafting of smoke from the john or the miasma of marijuana on a kid's clothing.

We write recommendation letters personalized for each student and insist that they sign up for the ACT or trade school.

We utilize electronic technology in the classroom which is, on average, at least three to ten years old, which means it is roughly equivalent to using the Rosetta Stone to translate a Shakespearean soliloquy. And that's if we are lucky. Many of us rely on whiteboards or even, yes, chalkboards and overhead projectors. I do not even have a DVD player in my room. We sit on rickety furniture which is at least a decade old (ask not for whom the chair creaks, it creaks for thee) and use teacher and student desks missing screws and braces and sometimes held together by duct-tape.

We email or talk to parents/guardians/aunts/grandma regarding student progress, and almost every year we get one or two parents who claim that we are too hard, unfair, mean, capricious (although they never use that actual word), or that we pick on their kid or just flat-out make up crazy claims about us. We then must defend ourselves against these claims because no matter how exemplary our conduct administrators are never willing to simply ignore claims that fly in the face of observation or rationality.

We obey the orders of administrators and school board members even though they change and contradict each other weekly or sometimes even daily. We gather data and analyze it even though no one will implement the changes necessary to improve the outcomes that the data exposes. We construct assessments and plan lessons after everything else has taken up our planning time. We attend IEP meetings on our planning time, as well. We attend hour-long faculty meetings that could have been summarized in a three paragraph email and listen to powerpoints being read to us. We fill out surveys, the results of which will never be shared with the faculty, especially if they contradict the plans administrators are determined to carry out anyway.

We collect shoes for Africa and pennies for patients and wear pink for breast cancer and collect clothing for the family whose house burned down or for the refugees of natural disasters. We slip kids lunch money and notebooks and pencils and registration fees to take the ACT. We buy boxes of the good kleenex because the school doesn't provide anything but paper towels and single-ply toilet paper for the legions of kids who come to school sick. We diagnose pink-eye, strep, sprains, influenza, attention deficit disorder, broken hearts, and senioritis. We stay after school to tutor kids for free and use babelfish to translate notes home into mom or dad's native tongue. We go to plays and concerts and graduations and buy coupon books and frozen pizza we don't need to raise money for band trips or new golf shirts. We go to professional development. We pursue social justice.

We attempt to model compassion and responsibility and citizenship and engagement with the world and the pursuit of maximization of potential. We help kids rise above their circumstances and make no excuses for their failures just as we encourage them to celebrate their successes. We insist that education matters when the world and Snooki seem to prove otherwise and TLC used to be The Learning Channel but now tells you what NOT to wear and showcases toddlers in tiaras and people who eat laundry detergent.

Oh, and during the majority of our time, we teach kids subject matter and skills and try to get them to think about what their lives will be look outside the plastic bubble that is school.

A Woman of a Certain Age?

Our principal is in the habit of calling me by my first name, but not really. Now I haven't discussed this with y'all, my first name, because I'm not one of those "Oh, call me by my first name" kind of teachers with my students. And after yesterday, let's say that my first name is "Margarita," because "Miz Scotch-On-the-Rocks" just doesn't have the same je ne sais quoi. So, our principal calls me "Miz Margarita."

Now in the quasi-South, where I come from, "Miz Margarita" was used for quasi-aunts (dear friends of one's mother or uncles' third wives) and colorful old ladies who were looked upon fondly. Like "Miss Ellie" on Dallas.

Now I realize that I have SIX TIMES the teaching experience my principal does.

But I am not an old lady. And I think breaking up that fight yesterday proved that. See these (Kisses biceps, not an actual 9 mm) guns?

Words of wisdom from Morning Prayer

I was praying morning prayer today, and this was one of the readings. How ironic! I especially liked the first two verses.

James 3:1-12 (NRSV)

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. 2For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. 3If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. 4Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. 5So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by
a small fire! 6And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. 7For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, 8but no one can tame the tongue-a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. 10From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. 11Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? 12Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield
fresh.

Redux: When High School is like... a Divine Comedy

I just felt like it was time to revisit this former post again... Why? BECAUSE I MISS SUNLIGHT. DAMN YOU, STANDARD TIME.


For me, the school year is in full swing-- inasmuch as one can be when Winter Break seems a million miles away. For those of you who have forgotten, or who now look back upon your high school years through the rosy mists of fondness for that halcyon era when your head, not your back, was covered with hair and your tricep didn't flop around like a Tibetan prayer flag in a good stiff breeze, high school is organized into concentric circles of despair and Sisyphean drudgery which align quite nicely with the Nine Circles of Hell our friend and eternal optimist Dante Alighieri described so fully.

Circle 1- Limbo, the Home of the Innocent: The freshmen have already had most of the pranks pulled on them-- like looking for a swimming pool on the roof, or looking for the smoking area, or being told that we have open campus for lunch, and so on. They've lost a bit of that dazed look-- unless it's a permanent condition.

Circle 2-The Lustful: The "veteran" freshmen on the two- or three-year-plans are already falling back into their habits of trying to evade class as much as possible and still somehow be able to finagle enough credits to achieve sophomorehood. They lust for a way to get over. Those who lust for each other have tried to discover just where the security cameras don't work.

Circle 3- The Gluttonous: Last year's freshmen who made the cut to sophomores are hoping to have grown some-- the girls hoping to be able to fill out those teeny tanks they wear and the boys hoping to get closer to making that dunk on the basketball court. The boys can eat the weight of a newborn elephant in one sitting. Sophomores bear the grim visage of those who realize that they still must slog through an eternity of high school, and that as long ago as they were seventh graders? That's how long it will be before they graduate. The mathematically inclined have computed this sentence in Hell as the equivalent of 19.7% of their lives thus far.

Circle 4- The Hoarders and the Improvident: Most of the juniors are engulfed in a tsunami in post-high school planning, as the last deadline to register for the ACT was on last Friday, and they are frantically collecting honors to list on their applications and recommendations from harried staff. Those who swear that they'll NEVER want to go to college or trade school or sit in a classroom again are sneering at their classmates who are wigging out. They can't wait to get out of school so they'll never have to do what anyone tells them, EVER AGAIN.

Circle 5- The River Styx; the Wrathful and the Sullen: The seniors have slogged their way through all these levels only to discover that they are merely on the verge of true Hell. They've figured out to take AP and honors classes their first semester, and as soon as the transcripts are mailed off to their fifteen dream colleges to "drop them like it's hot" and coast through the rest of the year. The ones who SWORE that they would never want to go to college or trade school have lost a bit of that sneer as they are slowly coming to the realization that after antagonizing Mom and Dad for the last six years, what with the brushes with the law and the suspensions and the phone calls from school and the poor grades, their parents are COUNTING the days until they can tell their offspring that their bedroom has become an exercise room, and seven bucks an hour at TWO part time jobs at fast food joints minus something called FICA and social security will get them a run-down one bedroom apartment with three roommates, rides to work on a bus, peanut butter sandwiches, no vacations EVER-- much less three months in a row off, no health care, and tennis shoes from K-Mart, not Foot Locker. No bling, no phat threads, and no pimpin' any rides. Suddenly four years of sitting in a classroom listening to someone drone on and on about 18th century British literature or the principles of accounting doesn't sound nearly as stupefying as fifty years of soul-destroying repetitive labor where you come home at the end of the day with the smell of fried food permeating even your HAIR, which you now have to get cut at Great Clips four times a year. They've asked their uncle about that job at the Ford plant, but it's shutting its doors in 2009 and outsourcing to Mexico under NAFTA, and soon their uncle may be delivering pizzas and competing with them for jobs-- and he, at least, has a history of showing up to work on time and following directions, which gives him a big leg up on them.

Gosh, is it too late to take the ACT?

Circle 6- The City of Dis; the Heretics: The teachers have once again realized that no matter how thick the student behavior guide is, that the assistant principals have pretty much no interest in enforcing the policies on tardiness, dress code, attendance, cell phones, smoking in the john, or insubordination unless it's directed at them. These teachers will "dis" these administrators with considerable bitterness. They are already huddling in circles in the hallway, disputing the diagnoses buried in IEPs and 504s, and mocking memos from administration. They have their own vision of what the school should look like, but theirs is not a theology bearing the imprimatur of the powers that be, so they just appear out of touch with reality. Those who work hard and strive to inculcate their students with a love of learning are nonetheless vilified by the public and even some of their peers. Those who think that students should be accountable for their shortcomings are considered to be child-hating misanthropes.

Circle 7- The Violent: Many of the parents have already had all the phone calls from school they are going to tolerate. They have blocked calls from any building in the district. Others have been lurking malevolently in the counseling office since the end of July demanding that their kids' schedules be changed about five times, or that an entire class be created to fully meet the needs of their son or daughter. Already two hundred of them have tried to enroll their children in our district by claiming the address of the UPS store down the street, and if they don't get what they want, they will try to intimidate anyone within hearing, including our sweet little white-haired registrar.

Circle 8- Malebolge, The Fraudulent: The counsellors and principals fall into various categories listed by Dante. They either spent two years in a classroom and are 24 years old, or they spent two years in the classroom twenty years ago. But no matter what, they are experts in good teaching methods and writing curriculum, or so they assure the staff. Among them are:
Panderers, who just want to be the students' "friend;"
Flatterers, who will tell you that they think you're a great teacher only to dump more work on you;
Simoniacs, who shower dispensations for referrals upon kids, in a bid to supposedly "save" them from the "Heretics;"
Hypocrites, who will merely counsel a kid who calls a teacher that word for "a person who would engage in carnal activity with his maternal relative" but who suspends a kid for six days for calling the AP a sexual deviate;
Sowers of Discord, Scandal, and Schism, who hang out all day with their favorite staff members in their office, trading gossip and innuendo regarding the rest of the staff-- they think that teachers are all incompetent, hyperbolic, child-hating misanthropes.

Circle 9- The Traitors: The central office administrators and school board. They will bizarrely give permission for five hundred kids who supposedly live at the UPS store down the street to attend schools in our district, and they will refuse to investigate reports that students are being dropped off at bus stops in cars with license plates from a neighboring state. They will overturn suspensions upon a whim. They will go to the National School Board Association meeting in Miami with their entire families while they tell teachers there is no money for raises and their deductible for health insurance will need to triple. They think that teachers are all incompetent, hyperbolic, child-hating misanthropes who are overpaid.


And how would our friend Dante describe this abode?

“And when, with gladness in his face, he placed his hand upon my own, to comfort me, he drew me in among the hidden things. Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries were echoing across the starless air, so that, as soon as I set out, I wept. Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements, accents of anger, words of suffering, and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands—all went to make tumult that will whirl forever through that turbid, timeless air, like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls.” [Dante, as he enters the Gates of Hell. Canto III, Inferno]

Cue Gloria Estefan.

If you are any kind of secondary teacher eventually the kids will confide in you. This is by far the most anxiety-producing part of the job for me. I seriously pray that I will not screw up when these confidences are shared and I have to decide what my response will be, but respond I will, and I let the kids know it. I will listen, I will offer advice if asked, but I do not promise to keep secrets if something I hear worries me about a student's welfare and safety. I tend to be of the no-nonsense, problem-solving practical breed of advice-giver: "What can you control? What CAN'T you control? Let go of it, control what you can, and have a plan for your life to overcome this obstacle in measurable steps."

There must be a full moon or something, because, today was a banner day. I carried the stories of THREE kids to the counselors today. I did this because they wouldn't go themselves. And go is exactly what they needed. And frankly they know this about me since I make no bones about it, so think they wanted me to push the point and get them there. Passivity is one of the worst signs of depression.

Despite my crusty exterior, once you are my student, you are one of "my kids." even sometimes if you haven't been my student, actually, as one of the kids from today's crises has never actually been in my classroom but is one of the kids I seem to be constantly chivvying in the hallway.

I am just saying this because, it is that time of year, friends. Five of my students are sharing with me that there is a divorce going on in the household. One has a dying grandma in a culture that especially reveres the older generation. Two are being watched for suicidal tendencies. One is being watched for an eating disorder. One is contemplating coming out, I think, even though he hasn't actually admitted it.

I would like to explain to all of the haters of public education that THIS is what we do as wll as convey information, cover objectives, assess learning, develop curriculum, grade, grade, grade, question, answer, raise ACT scores, tutor after school, support sporting events, increase vocabulary, write across the curriculum, take surveys, attend meetings, collaborate with coteachers, attempt to administer social justice, strengthen depth of knowledge and reasoning ability, teach how to take multiple choice tests, monitor the hallways, break up the occasional spat or fight, collaborate with colleagues and provide advice for new teachers, and prepare my students for career, college, and last but not least to pass the AP exam.

Because, really, kids, I would do anything for you.

Where's Waldo?

I am keeping a running count of how long it has been since I have the principal out of her office. We are now on day...



And how long has it been since I have seen her in my hallway? We are now on day



And while that may be happy times for me, I am not so sure it equals happy times for her. In my experience, a disappearing principal always is a sign of trouble, not to mention that one gets completely out of touch with the tenor of the school. Unless that is what one wants....

Finally, a parent question with an easy answer

It is now the middle of the semester, which means parents are suddenly pulling themselves out of their comas and realizing that their kids do not have the grades that the parents desire, no matter how many times we have contacted them about this fact.

So a colleague received a communication from a parent that asked why the kid had so many zeroes in the grade book.

"Because the student did not do the work," was the reply.

Kid told mom that through some vicious campaign, the teacher had never given him the assignments. Then she contradicted herself and said he couldn't find them any more. So where can she get all of the assignments for the entire next unit?

Easy. From your kid. All you've gotta do is ask him for him. Asking every day might do it.

And another thing!

One of my colleagues came to pitch a situation to me that I have to admit I had never encountered in all my career in the classroom.

"One of my students has informed me that she no longer wants to be referred to by feminine pronouns. Instead, she wants to be addressed by masculine pronouns. How would you handle it?" asked my friend.

I see the difficulty. Of course, one wants to be absolutely sensitive and respectful of students and their situations, but when one is in the middle of teaching, and the flow of information is coming fast and furious, one could slip up. A lot.

I asked if she had changed her name, too, or wanted that changed, and he said no. So... Here's what I suggested:

Certainly agree to do one's very best to accommodate the student's request, a long as the kiddo understands that we are only human and we may accidentally slip up every now and then. Then refer to the young lady either in first person ("Jamie, you forgot your book,") when using pronouns or just refer to the young lady by name whenever possible.

Then try to keep this in the forefront of one's brain while tying to do the twenty-two other tasks one juggles while attempting to teach a class of teenagers.

Whew.

If it's a pretend administrator, is it a real observation?

We have the most wonderfullest idea that has been created by our district administration this year, and it has had amusingly unforeseen consequences for Ms. Cornelius.

Here's the deal: the Powers That Be have revived the farcical "Leadership Cadre." What might this be, you ask? Well, remember that our district has an absolutely stellar record of hiring district employees for administration jobs-- and by stellar I imply events so rare as to be separated by light-years.

But wait! Let's get some teachers who have administrative certification-- and frankly, no hope in hell of actually being hired-- fill in when one of our peripatetic assistant principals gets to go jaunting off to a conference in Orlando or Bimini or Noo Yawk. Boom! Voila! "Leadership Cadre!" These chumps members of the Leadership Cadre will then garner administrative experience. Forget that whilst these ersatz nabobs are substitute nabobing, they will not be fulfilling the function for which they were hired and for which a school district exists: namely, teaching students. No; let the students eat substitutes!

Now, there is one particular dewy-eyed dreamer who leapt at this chance-- whom I will call "Bob," since "Sawed-Off Runt" seems far too brutal, if apropos. I can see the attraction of administration for Bob. He only puts eight grades in the gradebook per semester as it is, but if he becomes an AP he has figured out that that number will drop to zero. And that's less, right? (Did I mention Bob teaches math?)

So the other day, there was Bob be-bopping around in his little pressed suit, haunting the hallways for something to do that didn't actually involve confronting the fifteen kids he passed who didn't have passes and weren't in class. How do I know this? Because when I first spotted him I was performing administrative duties myself against my will instead of being able to work with students, which is a story for another day.

So Bob disappeared from my radar screen while I dealt with the crew of Skippies he had so assiduously failed to recognize. Quelle suprise, his absence from my notice didn't last long.

Later on I am standing in front of a class of frolicksome students, discussing the current situation in the Sudan before we got ready for a quiz, when suddenly Bob materializes on my doorstep. 'Pon my honor, he actually opened with the gambit of "Whatcha doin'?"

Let's see: kids, in desks, hands raised, synapses firing. Adult in front of room in comfortable shoes and khakis, pointing at map. What does it look like I'm doing?

And it got worse from there. HE. WOULDN'T. LEAVE. He peered at my learning goals on the board. He hemmed. He hawed. He cleared his throat unctuously. He struggled to come up with some sort of pedagogic nugget of wisdom, but lapsed into straightening his tie for the fourteenth time. He called out the names of kids he knew like a late-night caller to a radio request show. His fidgetty presence halted the momentum of the Ship of Knowledge we had been sailing more thoroughly than a German torpedo fired at the Lusitania. The kids were fascinated by his flitting about the room-- they couldn't help it.

After he finally skedaddled for parts unknown, I resumed doing that strange thing he didn't recognize for the sad remnant of the class period. It wasn't until lunch that I realized the little blister had been attempting to observe me.

And he may beat those odds in terms of getting a full-time gig. He has "administrator" written all over him. All I know is that my students learned less, and he undoubtedly learned nothing.

The blind man and the elephant

Yes, we have a new assistant principal. In this case, "new" actually does mean "two seconds older than a biscuit." Now, listen, everybody has to start somewhere, but so far, his naïveté is more startling than a nudist at an Amish barn raising.

Cases in point: he keeps inventing forms to fill out and reminds us every other day to visit the school wiki. Worse, he's making the secretaries crazy-- and anyone who knows anything knows that if the secretaries ain't happy, ain't NOBODY happy. Including me.

I am glad he's so enthusiastic. No, wait--I'm lying. And furthermore, I have to work on my resentment of the fact that he makes me feel about a hundred years old.

But when he insinuated that I should have somehow known that a student was gay from her appearance I did fix him with the Eye of Fury and gently but firmly suggest that judging kids based on appearance would make us no better than our students. Not to mention that if you make a big deal about something, you often imply that there is something WRONG with it. Not that there is anything wrong with it, as the line goes. I mean, I am pretty well known on campus, but I certainly don't know every kid on campus, much less the intimate details of their lives when I do not know them at all. This guy has nearly made me say, "Now listen here, sonny...." about seven times a week since school began.

And I am NOT that old.

There ain't no way in heck.

So apparently, the latest qualification to be considered an excellent teacher is to give kids and parents one's cell phone number so that they can reach you at any time.

TFA says we should do it. Michelle Rhee says we should do it.

Well, to subside into my Okie lingo, I ain't doin' it.

Here's the deal: I pay for my cell phone with my own money. It is not subsidized by the district. I got it when I had kids of my own so that I could be able to be in touch in case of an emergency. I do not give out my cell number to just anyone. Now, in a moment of weakness, I gave the thing to my principal, but so far the only thing that has happened is that she gave my number to a flunky at the district offices who needed to apologize to me (it's a loooong story). That, and I did exchange numbers with Good AP so I could tease him about football, and that's been fun.

But back to the point. Apparently, there is the educational equivalent of the "Madonna/whore" complex going on right now in the criticism of American teachers. Either you are a self-abnegating martyr who has no personal life nor has any right to expect one, or you are a tenured, lazy vampire sucking life from the government teat who has no concern about your students. It's like we're living in 1922 all over again. My grandma was a teacher in 1922. She had to live with a family in town so that she could be chaperoned. It was required that she be a member of the Baptist Church in the tiny Oklahoma town in which she was employed as well as a Sunday school teacher (2 for the price of 1!!!) and God help her if she didn't attend church every Sunday. Once she got married to grandpa, she had to quit. She had no privacy, she had no independence, she had no options.

Students and parents, I do not live in 1922. I will work my butt off for you during the school day and for an hour thereafter. I am available every day after school and I have a class website. But when I do leave school, I am now on family and personal time. You have no right to my cell phone number or to my personal email. You can already reach me during the work day. And that doesn't mean that I don't care deeply about my students. But I refuse to just go along with the current conundrum facing the American worker over productivity. I am extremely productive during the day. But I am just as certain that that productivity entitles me to some time on my own during the time I am not on the clock. This includes, weekends, evenings, and summer-- all of which is unremunerated free time. I get no paid vacation and two personal days. And I am fine with this-- until you decide it's your right to encroach upon that too. It's like that phrase from the labor unions of the 1880s: "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what I will."

The only reason why students or parent would need my personal cell number 24-7 is if the student themselves are either overscheduled or are putting off doing my assignments until late at night. And in either case, the solution is not in my hands. I also have a life. I also have a family. And they serve some consideration, too.

I tell you what: when the principals and administrators give me and the parents their cell phone numbers (on their taxpayer-supplied cell phones), I may reconsider. But I doubt it.

What mentoring will teach you

I have a teacher whom I am mentoring this year. She is not a fully new teacher, but she is new to our district. And you know what this experience has taught me already this year?

We are expected to juggle so many disparate tasks throughout the class period, the day, and the grading period, it's unbelievable. There is so much we are just expect to know how to do. You have to know the secret process for adding in behavior grades to the electronic grade book, how to interpret the attendance codes, how to fill out the new behavior referrals, how much parental contact is expected, which principals one can rely upon and which principals are completely non-supportive and clueless, how to generate and finalize grades and reports, and so on.

I am learning as much as she is. Primarily, that the demands of this job can be bewildering. I've just gotten inured to it.

You know, teaching is sometimes a dirty business....

I've been reviewing the Nixon administration with my regular history students, and so I shall borrow his patois to tell my tale-- without, hopefully, the sense of overarching paranoia mixed with hubris that only Tricky Dick could manage to maintain within one personality without getting psychological whiplash. The words of that great sage of never giving up are boldfaced for you, for those that want to play along as I tell my tale.

Ms. Cornelius has been dealing with a few issues, my fellow Americans, that not even my little dog Checkers could wag away. My favorite uncle passed away, as did my godmother. The advanced placement test is upon us, and time weighs heavily against AP teachers everywhere as an enemy every bit as wily and inscrutible as Chairman Mao, and yet meet it we must. But as I remind my students, *a man is not finished when he is defeated, a man is finished when he quits.* So I want you to know that I have not given up, but I have just been fighting the good fight, and I apologize for my recent silence. Here is my tale:

Ms. Cornelius did get to have the pleasure of writing my second referral of the year today, when a colleague who does not have exactly the classroom management skills one would wish for asked me to help remove a student from her presence. Now, *the greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker,* so in I stepped into the abyss. Small wonder that this nattering nabob of negativism refused to come with Ms. Cornelius despite repeated, mild requests in front of a roomful of other students. *We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.* I usually am all about this plan of action: *Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.* He refused to leave until he knew what he had done from his teacher, and she told him, but he still refused to move nor did he listen to me when I told him to come with me, calmly, seven times, because, you know, *I am not a quitter.* Finally, for the first time in my long career, I was forced to call for our police officers to lend me their assistance to remove his presence from the room, as the expression on the miscreant's face became insanity tinged. *But I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.* When the nabob saw that I actually did request the presence of the coppers, he suddenly jumped up and brushed past me to the door. So the three cops and I got to walk him to the principal's office. *I believe in the battle-whether it's the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle.* After I left him in the care of a principal, I returned to the class, and the students did wonder at my calmness in the face of blatant insubordination heightened with a little frisson of danger. "How did you keep your cool, Ms. Cornelius? He was BAAADDD!" they wondered. "*Don't get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.*" I replied, and they did marvel. But that's why we're here, to provide examples of how to overcome adversity in a way that doesn't get you fired or suspended. So there was a little lesson. It's what we do.

When I wrote up that referral, I made sure to use the THREE MAGIC WORDS. These three words are: INSUBORDINATION, DISRESPECT, and (threatened) INTIMIDATION. Now, we have been strongly admonished to never use the three magic words in referrals. We have been told it is not the privilege of teachers to determine when we ourselves have been the unwilling recipients of these behaviors-- that the administrator in question will decide if you have been disrespected and threatened in such a manner, even though that administrator was not there at the time. Even if that administrator spent all of two years in the classroom. But my motto when writing referrals as in writing this blog in this: *Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.* And the truth is this little miscreant has screamed in the face of more than one staff member and student in his time. Now I believe that actions speak loudly. *My concern today is not with the length of a person's hair --nor with the depth of the sag that he busts-- but with his conduct.* And his conduct is something that I can diagnose just fine, thank you. So in went the three magic words, which do tie an administrator's hands in terms of response. And that is exactly what I intended, since this principal is known for distributing mercy where it does not flourish but rather only encourages more problems. So I went ahead and used those three words, (and being me, I even circled them for effect) come what may in terms of annoyance on his part. *If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything.*

And so, my fellow Americans, continue to fight the good fight until the end of the school year. It's your duty.

A gal walks into a school, and....

So yeah, literally two point five minutes after I walk into school, lost in my own thoughts, I get to help break up a girl fight as one of the school cops stands there open-mouthed until the danger is over. As I am thinking, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner," I'm having to put some silly kid in a hold to keep her from knocking over a fellow staff member before 7 o'clock in the dang morning, and thinking, "Damn. I shoulda stood in bed."

I am sure the copper was stunned by my mad skillz as I put Dummy Number 1 up against a wall before she went back for a third helping of butt-whupping, but really.....

Dude, are these the reflexes we wish to see in our law-enforcement personnel? Because, you know, I am just an amateur, as the French would sneeringly say, but umm? You can't move faster than a middle-aged fat lady?

But one of my students who witnessed the whole debacle emailed me a .wav file of Darth Vader saying "Impressive." Now that made me laugh after a long, hard day.