Somehow, when you're an ATR at a school, you don't really feel part of it, and I very much feel as if I should remember that I am just a visitor on Planet Tilden. I made the mistake this week of getting very vocal, very vulnerable, and just generally too brash. People don't know me well enough and don't need to as they are concluding a story through which I am just a footnote.
So, I apologize for beginning to get comfortable when I have no right to be. I would feel angry if someone tried to know BCNHS from it's last two years.
So, the last place in which I taught was BCNHS. I'm a guest at Tilden. Not faculty. Just an accidental tourist.
4 comments:
Keep speaking--yuo not only have the right, you have the obligation.
I am so tired of the way the ATRs in my building are treated. I wish they would stand up as you did. I wish they would feel like they were part of the place. They do their fair share to keep it running.
It's not that I don't have the right. It's that it's really inappropriate. I'll be blunt. I started to complain about something everyone else was and I got no support. True, I was extremely tired when I did this and I couldn't be articulate. The reality is, is that I don't know how things work at this school -- when you can really speak up and when you can't. And I was probably speaking at a useless time anyway. I am completely overwhelmed right now by a few things, but I am the least taxed and least important person in this equation. People have retirements to consider or tail ends of careers which are going to be hard to continue. Compared to everyone else, I have it made. I'm younger. The school has been cut down to people with 20 plus years. Everyone else has been farmed out as an ATR. I'm liked by the administration, probably in part because I'm new to the school and carry none of its history/baggage. Everything that can be done to me has almost already been done, too -- school's been cut, etc. So, I'm like a traveler in another country. Well, without some of the freedom that the phrase, "another country" implies, but still.
Twice at Tilden I have had moments of phenominal inarticulateness about things for which I am passionate. I am beginning to wonder if it's the air...or if I have MS or something else like it. Seriously.
Sorry you are feeling like that but I find that most teachers will not back you up, no matter how long you are at the school and most administrators have no interest in what you say, no matter who you are.
So, stop letting them make you feel like an outsider. Say what is on your mind. Sometimes it works out.
I have finally found a principal that appreciaters my big mouth and it is wonderful.
Post a Comment