Wishing I were green

So, as you all know, I finally got hired by a new school a few weeks ago. For a while, I was really happy and confident. Now, an incredible fear is setting in. It's a new grade level for me, and two new courses. When I was younger, I might've continued to feel fearless. Now I wake up in the morning wishing I could forget this job offer had ever happened.

A lot has happened in the 17 years I've been around the Dept. of Education. I've had many good years and learned from mistakes. However, I'd become good with certain populations and my strengths were very much natural outgrowths of my own personality and history. I tried to get work at schools which work with this population, but they are almost completely controlled by New Visions -- a non-profit which doesn't seem very interested in teachers over 40. In fact, that company consistently only offered me substitute positions. When I wrote to them repeatedly explaining that I was an experienced, full-time teacher and didn't know why they kept making me these offers, they would apologize, then repeat the pattern.

Many people believe if you can teach, you can teach anyone, but think about it: do you hand an internist who has been working with diabetics and heart patients in their middle age to a population of pre-teens? Of course, the doctor can read up on this group, but it's not the same as knowing them from long experience. Doctors become known as good for particular problems. Why would you deny teachers the right to a certain expertise? Do you think the same methodology works for ten year olds as it does for sixteen year olds? It doesn't, and actually, the populations require very different personalities.

So, I'm sick to my stomach with the prospects of the job ahead. Not that I don't want to learn new skills, but wondering if the learning curve is too large given the time I have before September. I know that if I am not emotionally connected to the material I teach, I am very unconvincing in delivering it. I haven't quite found what I want to present and when I settle on something I wonder if it will work or not.

The Dept. of Education's purposeful removal of teachers from their areas of strength, first by putting them in the Assigned Teacher Reserve, and then by denying us the right to use our seniority to help us find jobs which best meet our skill sets is destructive to students and teachers. Teachers are methodical creatures and those who have survived as long as I have usually have excelled in a particular area. As with pitchers, some of us are starters and some of us are relievers. Principals have used us to their advantage the way managers have.

Not many people are John Smoltz and can move from reliever to starter at any point in our careers. The blessing came for us, as it does for pitchers, doctors, lawyers, etc. when we found our niche and proved excellent within it. I face the prospect of my new position now as if I were a new teacher again, but I lack the novice's ignorance of what can go wrong. I know that in this economy, people are loathe to care about fairness: a job is a job. I wonder if that is the recipe for a system which will sustain itself, however. How many people will find themselves readily unemployed by moving from position to position after first having had a lifetime of success at something which they have been forced out of doing.

I don't remember ever thinking of my teachers as cogs in a machine -- placeable wherever you put them. I don't know if anyone, given a chance to think about it, would want their first grade teacher to have reappeared in high school, gold stars and rubber stamps in hand. Nor would you have wanted your intrepid, psychologically astute 11th grade literature teacher to be teaching second grade.

My life feels no more secure now than when I was an ATR and I feel very much like I've made a terrible mistake.