Children won't listen.

I told myself I never wanted to be one of those peppy, overweight English/Theater teachers who sings songs like Sondheim's "Children will listen," at assemblies. Obviously, the overweight isn't what bothers me as I've grown accustomed to my girth. It's the cloying sentimentality which I distrust probably because I was raised to and do respond to it. It has just enough of Mr. Rogers' gentle scolding and the rumbly sound of ocean which resonates within the litany of women's literature about failure and suicide. (Ah, the hate emails should be pouring in. FYI: I don't mean Virginia Woolf. I mean Kate Chopin and any story which talks about wallpaper.)

If we wanted to make assemblies in which students would listen, we'd invite students to be part of the process. And I'm sure a lot of teachers and administrators would like to do that. Why don't they? When the temperature reads "standardized tests" the emotional range within the school usually is pushed to within about .005 of a degree. We become apologetically automatic in the name of seeming fair. But what could be less fair:

You pour a group of students into a large echoing chamber with no real sound system and poor sightlines. There's also no breeze, but lots of dust of every kind. Just from lack of use, the auditorium has the feel of an envelope sitting in the back of the desk drawer for fifty years.
Then you ask the teachers to tell the students to be quiet. You don't necessarily tell them why. The best they can create is a kind of homage to the feeling of loss that one might get before throwing the envelope away. And even the cheapest of you would throw it away as it is so coarse and moldy -- dry and moldy --something mushroom-like has definitely left spores.

Okay, so the kids are down to silent talking and shifting and then the adults are up there deciding whose idea the assembly was and why it's being held. This is not a particularity of any one school. It's par for the course everywhere. At Brooklyn Comprehensive, we tried never to have these things at all.

Then somebody speaks and whatever he/she might've said gets translated along distance and volume....

We haven't had an assembly where I work, but the feel of the place is one of having been be-labored with busywork, memoranda, emails and the re-definition of what used to be called a grade book into "DATA." I am a few minutes away from a meeting now in which I will be asked not really for my opinion, but to listen for what I am going to be told to do. Can you imagine anything, besides an assembly being this insane:

You pour a group of teachers into a hot room at the end of the day. They can see the dust spinning in the rays of sunshine. You talk to them about a test which they have been concerned about for much of their teaching lives and which they, by now, know how to handle. But, you take away all their power to handle it. And you want them to be quiet. They wait while the administrators draw straws outside about who is going to tell this year's bad news. We already know that we have no room in our current curriculum for test-prep -- in the English classes, anyway. We already know EXACTLY WHO is failing, what their scores were two test sessions ago, etc. We will be told that this is NOT DATA. Data is not found among actual results. It must be specifically collected, the way we note what pages our students are on in their independent readings. We are actively measuring their reading. If we just looked at, oh, how many books they could read in a marking period, it wouldn't be the same because that would be marking period information. There wasn't a scientific process or anything. I mean, you might've assessed the students on different days of the week. With slightly different forms....

Somebody comes into the room and starts talking and it is translated quietly in looks and very silent body language. One idiot talks too much and that's usually me. But, not today. My colleagues are all excellent teachers. They should be listened to. When they get their say, I'll wait my turn and then say mine.

Nobody starts their career wanting to be pushed into oblivion. Nobody.

High Anxiety

I think I heard that Gary Sheffield is on the disabled list because of anxiety.

As an ATR unable to navigate a new place with no real roots or space of my own, I believe I understand how debilitating anxiety can be. Every night, before I go to bed, I plot out a "plan of attack" on the school building. I'll spend the morning in the programming office between classes and the afternoon in the students' cafeteria when I'm not "pushing in" to someone else's class. As for those teachers who don't seem to enjoy my presence, simple: I won't go. There are other teachers who would like me instead. None of the haters will report me as they don't want me back and none of the lovers will squeal as they want me to be able to come back unobtrusively.
No way any AP who happens to be watching members of either group (because there are objecters to the hideous curriculum we employ on both sides) is going to catch me (perhaps one of the most outspoken critics of said lessons.)

Needless to say, it's an exhausting enough prospect that after two sleeping pills, plus melatonin, I doze off for about four hours before waking up in the complete realization that THIS WILL NEVER WORK. The prospect of going back into the teachers' lounge and sit and be ignored, "whatever-ed," "dismissed," or accorded so much fear that my colleague's mouth dries and she legitimately reaches for sound along the vein-color pallor of her lips, makes me want to feel my worst symptoms of my most difficult ailments, just a little more intensely.

And simply put, I can't sleep until I over-sleep.

The big sleep

Want to see some kids who can't read listening to a book being read to them which they don't understand....

Honesty

I was given the AP class in my school to teach while the teacher who normally teaches it is ill.

I feel guilty. Yes, I asked to cover the class -- the teacher's entire schedule about a week ago. I didn't do it with the idea in my head of whether I deserved it or not. I just did it because I wanted to do it. I didn't get the rest of the schedule, but I got the AP Class. I sort of get why -- I never got the Ramp-Up training so maybe I don't know enough to lead a class in it. I've taught AP English before, though not with a class as good as this one. I was mediocre at it. I'd've been better had my students done homework.

However, I feel like the senior teachers should be teaching AP English and I shouldn't be. I don't know why I care, or why it bothers me when I have a shopping cart full of books waiting to "Proceed to Checkout" which I want to buy to help me with the class and I'm up now to work on my lessons. It's not that I don't like teaching it. I do. Clearly, I do. I'm spouting off as much as I can remember ever learning and I'm thinking about reading Oedipus Rex aloud in my passable Greek.

It's wrong, though. Much as my outburst last week was wrong. I don't have the right to outrage or preferences. These people have been here for twenty years. I'm just part of the Occupation.

It's not just politically correct politics. It feels god-awful.

So, I'm going to send an email to my chair and the principal expressing the wish that a senior faculty member take the class and I'm going to talk to my union rep as well. My colleagues are all teaching this hideous Ramp-Up curriculum and it's killing them. Plus, they've earned this in this place and I haven't. I believe that.

I don't even mind if my colleagues feel schadenfreud if one of them takes the class away from me. They deserve to feel it. I am feeling self-conscious and miserable in too many ways. Plus, I know I can teach this class some other time in some other place. This isn't my school. It never will be. Even though I also have a Tilden baseball cap in one of my many "Wish Lists" on-line. For me that's fashion, whereas for the other folks at this school it's history.

The trouble is, I don't know if my saying anything will do anything positive, but I'll try. No one at my school reads this blog so they'll never know what I felt. That's okay, too. I write this as one of many ATR's and teachers-who-also-write-and-do-art-in-their-other-lives.