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.